Smoke and Mirrors

Politicians, media pundits, economists and business leaders are blowing a lot of smoke up society’s collective ass in their attempts to perpetuate the myth of economic recovery. Almost no one understands (or pretends not to) that this time around there won’t be one. Even the so-called economic experts, from Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Robert Reich on the left to John Boehner, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin on the right, seem to miss the big picture; the global economy is on the verge of collapse because of a growing scarcity of cheap energy and other vital resources that fuel economic growth. Industrial Capitalism is dying, as inevitably it must, and the economy we once knew is never coming back.

What does the future a decade hence look like?

If the future you visualize is filled with flying cars, cheap gasoline, frequent air travel to exotic destinations, lavish lifestyles for the masses, vast domed cities and all the other claptrap favored by futurists of the corporate class, you’re in for a big surprise. And bitter disappointment.

Ponder this:

When today becomes yesterday, it will be tomorrow.

If (having pondered) your vision of the future is still distorted by wishful thinking, perhaps a change in perspective can help you see things as they are. Juliet Schor’s Yes! Magazine article, Less Work, More Living, describes her vision* of a future that could become reality, providing we survive the current round of Democratic cowardice and short-sightedness and Republican stupidity, intransigence and obstructionism. Oh, alright—and rampant greed.

When today becomes yesterday, it will be tomorrow. Exactly what does this mean? It means that when our present—our now—looks more like the 1890s (with certain social, fashion and technological improvements) than the 1950s, we can be certain that our sustainable future has arrived. Ms. Schor presents a pretty clear vision of what our future could be like.

As it turns out, it’s not so scary after all.

*Her thinking on the subject of building a sustainable society closely mirrors mine.

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Voters' Guide 2010

If you want a corporate takeover of our democracy, vote for Republican candidates.

If you want an absolute breakdown of society and total chaos, vote for Tea Party candidates.

If you want to see the long, painful, glacier-slow recovery process continue, vote for Democratic candidates (but prepare to keep successful candidates on a short leash).

If you want to build sustainable communities and societies in which sanity and reason and new national commitments to unity and prosperity prevail, vote for Progressive/Green Party candidates and get to work.

The privilege of living in a corporatocracy democracy comes with the responsibility of being somewhat engaged in the political process throughout all its stages. Register to vote. Vote the candidates and issues of your choice. But please, I beg of you, make informed, intelligent choices. Fox News and the myriads of televised campaign ads are not reliable sources of accurate information on political candidates and issues, and the sad reality is that others in the media mainstream aren’t much better; certainly, none of these provide the information you need to cast your vote wisely.

Political savvy comes from doing your homework, and it’s not entirely without effort. Everything you need to know is online, accessible via Google Search and a series of mouse-clicks. Research the issues first, so that you understand all of the effects a particular outcome will have, then research each candidate’s position on each issue. If you research the candidates first, all you’ll get are a lot of pretty, high-sounding words; what you won’t get is relevant or accurate information to help you cast an intelligent vote.

Knowing who funds particular candidates and issues is important, too. Don’t get suckered into voting against your own best interests by special interest groups whose agents and representatives say one thing and do another. The interests they serve are theirs, not yours.

Unless you make upwards of a million dollars a year, voting the Republican ticket is probably not in your best interests. If you want to see job growth and an expanding economy, you’ve got to support labor, and that almost always means voting for candidates who are not Republican. It goes without saying that voting for Tea Party candidates (about which I’ll write more in a future post) serves no one’s interest.

Insist on better government, not smaller government (if you want smaller government, stop having babies). Vote for fair elections and election reform. Vote for education. Vote for infrastructure renewal projects that take into account society’s future needs. Vote for renewable energy projects that lessen demand for fossil fuels from any source. Vote for corporate reform, healthcare reform, economic reform and tax reform. Vote for anything that puts people ahead of corporations. Always vote for long-term benefits rather than short-term gains because short-term solutions always bear the higher costs.

As you prepare to mark your ballot for Election 2010, keep in mind that it was the Republican administrations of Reagan/Bush, with passive help from spineless Democrats who were too afraid to act, that caused a huge spike in the national debt, and it was they who failed to pay down the debt when they had the chance; instead, they cut taxes and continued their deregulation binge. Clinton paid down the debt; Bush the Younger ran it up, again. Now, Obama has to run the debt even higher in order to clean up Bush’s mess. Look at the state the country’s in today and connect the dots.

Don’t be fooled by Republican campaign slogans; precious few of them contain a shred of truth. Despite their claims that Democrats are destroying the country, it is the Republicans—along with their corporate sponsors—who were, are and want to continue to be the architects and engineers of social, economic and environmental mayhem in the US and around the world.

Smart voters will deny them that chance.

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The Beginning of the End . . .

Environmental degradation, global climate changes, pending food and water shortages, a looming energy crisis, a burst housing bubble, massive (and growing) unemployment, unrelenting war, a pending transportation crisis, crumbling infrastructure, and a foundering economy based on unsustainable revolving credit should be enough to tell us we’re doing something wrong. Is anybody paying attention? Probably not, at least not until this season’s reality TV shows have run their course.

A perfect storm of calamities has overtaken us, and none of the proposals so far put forth by the President, the House, the Senate, Wall Street buff . . . er, tycoons, the Federal Reserve, corporate CEOs, and all the other pay-to-play or paid-to-play performers in the powerbroker hierarchy are ambitious enough or smart enough to head it off or to even mitigate some of the damage it’s causing.

Politicians afflicted with tunnel vision and an ingrained belief that political expediency is the best tool for addressing whatever problem arises are as much to blame for this perfect storm as the people who set the various components of the storm in motion by manipulating the economy for personal gain. If they realize that dealing with the core problem, the economy, in exactly the right way will cause all related problems to resolve themselves, they’re keeping it a closely guarded secret.

In regards to the economy, forget about recession; that car went behind the pit wall a long time ago and a full-blown depression replaced it. As our economic engine continues to lug down to a standstill, what we need, now—more than a gear change to bring the engine back up to speed—is a complete change of vehicles. Maintaining the status quo is not a viable option, and doing more of the same things that got us into this mess is not going to get us out of this mess.

While most people who are in a position to do something about it agree that some type of stimulus spending package needs to be implemented quickly, few agree as to how much money to spend and what to spend it on. Rather than entertain ideas that will actually work, the GOP (Greedy Obstructionist Politicians) snipe at Democratic proposals while arguing (erroneously and disingenuously)) that free markets and tax cuts for the wealthy are the best solutions.

Meanwhile, the Democrats steadfastly refuse to grow the spines and/or the balls necessary to tell the Repugthuglicans that they’re no longer in charge. Did Rome burn while Nero fiddled around? As a matter of fact, it did, and much the same thing seems to be happening here, only on a larger scale.

The key to getting the economy back on track is to get money moving again, and only banks and government have the financial clout to make it happen. Middle-class/working-class people can’t and won’t be much help; until their jobs are secure and future paychecks guaranteed they aren’t likely to spend money on anything but absolute essentials—the most basic of basic necessities. One-time stimulus payments are more likely to end up buried in the back yard than they are to flow into the economy.

Letting the banks fail would have dire consequences for the economy and therefore is not an option, but before forking over huge amounts of the taxpayers’ cash to bail them out, government should reinstate all of the regulations that were removed since the beginning of Reagan’s deregulation orgy and impose a few new regulations to insure against further abuses.

As it stands, Timothy Geithner’s bank rescue plan is a formula for failure. At the least, government should nationalize the failed and failing banks, fire the executives responsible for this disaster, cancel all bonuses and “performance” awards, sell off the fleets of corporate jets and executive limos to someone who can afford to waste the money, and do whatever else it takes to restore solvency and put the banks back on the path to profitability.

What we are witnessing now is nothing less than the end of life as we know it, and the situation is sure to get worse before it starts to get better. That’s just the way these things work. But the end doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing; the end of one thing could be the beginning of something new, of something more equitable and fair for everyone, of something that measures wealth not in terms of money but in quality of life.

In the end, reality will trump political ideology. In the end, we will either get it right or we won’t. If we get it right, the end will signify the end of the beginning and suspend the game of politics as usual. If we don’t, the end will be just that—the end of everything human.

Cynic that I am, at this point in time I’m betting on won’t.