Posted on Evans Liberal Politics, Truthout article by James Howard Kunstler, commentary by Paul Evans, June 14, 2010.
The BP environmental atrocity is a huge distraction which allows pressing problems to be papered over. Intractable problems that may bring down the world's economy and lead to something far worse than we face today. ~ Paul Evans
Fierce Urgency, Truthout OpEd, June 14, 2010, by James Howard Kunstler, quoted verbatim, republished under Creative Commons license, commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans:
The exquisite morbidity of the BP oil spill has concentrated the collective national mind like few other events in this ongoing long emergency. How many times a day does it occur to you -- perhaps while sitting in traffic, or oogling some girl in a nearby cubicle, or cruising the freezer stacks in the supermarket -- that one mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico that crude is just blasting away into the deep blue sea? Anyway, it troubles my hours. But what if it hadn't happened? What if the nation's attention was not fixed on the "fierce urgency" of this disaster and we were left with all the tiresome familiar problems of politics and economy?
After the financial storms of May, people in the knife-and-fork-using nations may feel that all our troubles with money have been sorted out and settled. Greece had an apoplexy and Europe somehow survived -- at least so far. Spain fell to its knees and apparently remains there, in mid-aria, waiting for an orchestra to strike up the next measure. Portugal is trying to hide in plain sight, like a beach-goer who has lost swimsuit in the surf. Hungary choked on something last week and was left sitting at the table with its face in a plate of goulash. Iceland has been put on, well, on ice after stiffing its British account holders. The Brits have discovered that they have enough money to run their country in the style of Edward the confessor. France is weeping over all the Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese bad paper in its bank vaults. Italy, having become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Silvio Berlusconi, is eating lunch under the grape arbors. The Baltic states are sinking into a northern peat bog of penury.... And Germany remains upright, wondering how it can wiggle out of this sad-ass collective of fazed cookies.
June so far is a strange ebb tide of events relating to the world's money, but when the water goes out like that, you know it's sure to return before long, and the peaceful mud-flats of June may vanish under a summer tsunami. I know I'm not alone in the creepy feeling that really nothing has been sorted out and the world is waiting to get hammered six days to Sunday by the consequences of living too large for too long. The markets have been stranded, too, gyrating on the peculiar life-support of robot-traders -- since all the humans have packed up and left the scene for higher ground.
President Obama may be lucky that he has something he can pretend to be decisive about in the BP oil spill. It's allowed him to completely avoid taking a public stand on crucial parts of the financial reform legislation working its way through congress like a stinking bolus. For instance, where does Mr. Obama stand on the reform of credit default swap activities? This dark realm of swindling has come close to choking the American money system to death -- and might yet do the job -- but the president hasn't offered up a word of leadership on it. My guess is that the gestures of reform will leave reform completely unfinished by the time the high water of events starts rushing back in. All the structural fault-lines will remain as even more decay sets in and new cracks appear. Something is gonna give this summer.
It all comes down to one thing: the world is mismanaging contraction. The world will not solve the problems of massive over-complexity with more complexity. But scaling down is apparently not an option. It will happen whether we participate or not. The USA is like Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener.
This article has been published on James Howard Kunstler's blog.
Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: The financial reform bill winding it's way through Congress will pass soon. As in Europe, so in the United States. The underlying disease will be papered over, and the patient will be given a placebo and told to rest and stay in close touch with the doctor... But this financial reform package does nothing to alleviate the underlying disease of credit default swaps, derivatives whose ratings have absolutely nothing to do with the true health of the securities they are comprised of, and a rampant, dominating Wall Street that just about runs Congress now. Not to mention the Fed and it's criminally cozy relationship with Wall Street investment banks. Did you know that Goldman Sachs, for example, by registering in the "correct" locales, pays only about one percent of its revenues in taxes?
And why shouldn't it be this way (I mean, in what way shouldn't we expect this?). The people who run the investment banks are best friends with the people who are running the economy for the federal government. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Only thing is, time is running short. Did you know that for people who make less than $20,000 a year, the official unemployment rate is 31 percent? How long do you think America can go on like this, our future mortgaged with debt and our public officials in bed with the entities they are supposed to be regulating? The debt would disappear if the proper Keynesian "priming of the pump" (as Black, Krugman, Daily Kos' Bob Swern and other progressive economists call for) were done, and damned the deficit. The deficit would correct itself if the economy were brought back on a proper footing and people had money to spend again. Except that the paper being held by the investment banks is nearly worthless. The only way to cure that disease is to make the banks eat their losses in which case those banks would fail. No one ever mentions the "N" (nationalization) word. That goes against the national religion of ultracapitalism.
Everybody smile and genuflect at the emperor's new clothes. Same as the old clothes. Buck naked. Only breaking up the big investment banks and separating traditional banking from risky Wall Street investment activities would save us, and that is not going to happen with Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke in charge.
I have utterly no idea why a decent, progressive man like Barack Obama staffed his government with the likes of these corrupt, faithless economic charlatans. I guess they were properly in bed with the movers and shakers on Wall Street: maybe Obama had no real choice in the matter (maybe it's gone that far). Like so many progressive and liberals, I find the alternative conclusion that Obama is a corporatist through and through extremely unpalatable. I don't want to think that Obama would compromise his morality that way. I know that many if not most progressives, as well as Tea Party and libertarians have basically concluded that Obama is corrupt and purely a corporatist, too.
Maybe he's doing the best that any liberal-minded leader can do in these United States today. Rome in the third century A.D. And history teaches us that we don't learn from history.
I don't know. But I do know that there will come a reckoning. Maybe Kunstler is right and it will come this summer. Sooner rather than later. Or maybe we'll limp along for an indefinite future that won't heal. Either way, too bad for America. Too bad for the world. The world's financial sector needs a new doctor. One that won't prescribe placebos. Maybe, like the Bible says, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. God I pray not.
I apologize in advance to those politicians who still try to do the right thing. Not everything and everybody is corrupt. I guess this is just a vent. But it is the honestly held opinion of one who keeps a very close eye on developments and what's going on in the world. If you will, a voice crying out in the wilderness. Words no one wants to hear and nobody is going to listen to. Maybe later. ~ Paul Evans