So before someone throws out the term concern troll - I am just concerned.
There are real reasons for being concerned about certain policies and approaches and their consequences given the momentous events unfolding all around us. One of my favourite quotes from historic man-of-the-moment Winston Churchill is: "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences".
A period of consequences indeed. My fear is that we see pitchforks and torches by Labor Day.
I feel that the window for avoiding this sort if thing is rapidly closing, and that the Obama administration is just not appreciating, or is acting like it does not fully appreciate, the gravity of things. Business As Usual is not making a comeback. It's gone.
I feel that too many around here are busy lampooning and laughing at the cartoonish right wing blowhards and their congressional enablers when they should be taking what's going on far more seriously.
That's not being a concern troll. That's being concerned.
Pitchforks by Labor Day
There's a sucker rally going on right now, in the stock market. It's cheering up certain bobbleheads in our commentariat but it's not recovery. It's a case that's being made. There plenty of credible voices out there in economics-land who explain this far better than I can. I believe they are right. You may not but what if they are?
Worse what if they aren't right but it doesn't matter? There's good reason to believe that any significant recovery would lead to a rapid rise in oil prices surpassing the one a couple of years back - production has peaked and the period of low prices took offline various projects at mitigating production declines.
The real risk of the people like Beck, Limbaugh etc. is that there are a lot of people living in Beckistan right now. They don't have to be an electoral plurality. We live in a brittle interconnected society with significant built-in risk of critical system-failures (a topic that one of my favourite writers on the topic John Robb testified recently in congress about - and I hope he gets more and more people listening to his views and reading his Global Guerrillas blog as a result). It's really easy to cause widespread disruption (witness the recent telecommunications vandalism in the Bay Area). So you only need a small unhinged minority to be pushed over the edge to cause big problems. In the first-broken-window view of decline it's easy to see these guys chucking the first bricks.
Mobs once whipped up are notoriously difficult to control. They certainly don't start debating whether or not those who've riled them into a frenzy also supported the Banksters that are the proximate cause of the economic collapse they're so angry about (their anger presenting as a range of other bigotries but really it's all down to unmet expectations and the fear of worse to come). They go to the pitchforks and realise how easy it is to take it out on the actual bankers themselves. And possibly then the political class protecting them.
There was a window when perhaps this sort of thing could have been headed off - the incoming administration could have swept through with indictments and bank restructuring. The commentariat wouldn't have liked it but actually the mob would have been harder to rally against it than the blow hards might have thought. But the longer it looks like the Obama team is protecting the bankers' interests the more the right wing windbags get to pivot and make this the fault of the elites and the elitist Democrats who support them.
This day is coming. Even if my two points above regarding the economy are not right it's coming. You see all money is is a proxy for real resources. There are fewer and fewer usable resources in the world. We've infested every square foot of the planet - there's no new breakthrough finds to change the game. When you borrow with interest you are effectively saying you will give back a claim on greater amounts of resources to the oligarchs doing the lending. This has led to the inevitable concentration of wealth/resources in fewer and fewer hands leading to poor decision making. This is a wisdom of crowds effect in its purest form - due to a misunderstanding of markets and how they work by both the left and the right - a market is a machine that merely harnesses collective wisdom to achieve it's programming. In a world of interest the ultimate effect of capital markets will be to find the most efficient ways to allocate resources with the end of concentrating capital in the fewest hands. (That's why this whole nobody saw this coming stuff is nonsense - lots of people saw it coming and were dismissed as doomers, concern trolls, or just wrong.)
The point being that these broken economic systems cannot be fixed - by switching them on again we're just letting them foul up worse. (Like when the vacuum has something caught in it - switching it back on just burns out the motor). The recovery will not look like what came before the collapse. As people realise this they're going to be angry. With irresponsible wingnuts egging them on they will reach for the pitch forks.
(This is not to say there's no hope - I have long favoured a lifeboats strategy akin to John Robb's resilient communities - getting there from here is tough admittedly.)
I took a bet a while ago - I took the under on rioting over the economic situation unraveling before Labor Day, my buddy took the over. Which is why I don't see Beck et al as funny or a sign we're somehow winning something. The father of a good friend of mine was tasked with investigating the massacres in Rwanda for the UN. The degree to which radio hosts whipped up the machete wielding mob cannot be overstated. Neither can the level to which compliant politicians knowingly stood by or subtly helped push the memes that led to the violence.
A lot of people agree with the Andrew Sullivan assessment that these tea parties and the like are like the left in the 80s, powerless and all over the place. Meaningless tantrums. I see the difference being that today we're talking about a heavily armed rabble desensitized to violence fomented by right wing talk radio and Fox News idiots.
By not prosecuting the banksters Obama et al look complicit to many people (again doesn't have to be a plurality to create havok). And by not going after the Bush junta criminals we have a bunch of dangerous extremists who we now KNOW are prepared to use non-democratic means to achieve their ends still roaming around free and able to step into any vacuum (perceived or real).
...so in the hot dog days of summer with unemployment at levels not seen since the 1930s that tinkly you hear might just be the first window breaking. After that - well as a former boss of mine used to say - it's hard to unsh*t the bed.