The Real Deficit

...has nothing to do with US government revenues and expenditures.  The real deficit is environmental:  we are essentially consuming the very planet that sustains us.  

 In a recent article in the journal Science, researchers at Oregon State University and Harvard explained how they used marine fossils to piece together a rough temperature record going back 11,300 years to the most recent ice age. That record indicates that the Earth warmed as it emerged from the ice age, followed by a long-term cooling trend. The cooling continued until the industrial revolution, when humans began burning fossil fuels in earnest — and pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Then the temperature spiked. With the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, models suggest, the Earth’s average temperature in 2100 will surpass that detectable in any of the millennia studied.

The most dramatic implication of the study is not the magnitude of the current warming but its extremely rapid pace. The authors note that the Earth has warmed over the past century as much as it cooled over several millennia before that, with no similar spike detectable in the data.

A government deficit we can deal with in varying ways.  We can't make up the environmental deficit.  Once it's gone, it's gone.

Do that long enough and someday it's us that will be gone.

Infrastructure

"...greasy, dirty stuff still matters."

Eulogy for a Minor Star

"It is just strange how really talentless people get huge, and people like Vance, who are very few, don’t make it.”

--Jason Carmer speaking of bandmate and friend, the late Vance Bockis.

Speaking of Meaningless Gestures

A yellow ribbon is worth about as much as "Thank you for your service".

And over at Alternate Brain, Fixer tells it like it is with a hat tip to Odd Man Out and Susie.

Sobering

Today's Washington Post has an article about how the US came to have a $14 trillion debt a mere 10 years after balancing the budget with surpluses projected as far as the eye can see. The major culprits: the CheneyBush tax cuts and wars fought with borrowed money. Combine that information with Jacob Weisburg's observation that this nation is in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression with absolutely no economic leverage and any sensible observer can only fear for this nation's future.

If that is not bad enough, I just spent three days at the Veterans For Peace Convention where it was absolutely clear to me that very little of the just and sustainable society that I have worked to achieve over the past four decades has come to pass or is likely to occur during my lifetime. Perhaps the most telling moment was seeing a photograph of an anti-war protester carrying a sign that read, "I can't believe that after 40 years I am still protesting this shit". All this is a very sobering reminder that I am clearly part in the minority and had best prepare myself to remain in that minority.

So that's the reality as I enter my "golden years" which are more likely to be pyrite years. About the only thing I think I know for certain is that I can either keep fighting or despair. I've lived too long for the latter so I guess I'll just have to keep fighting no matter how unlikely I am to see the society I've always envisioned.

My consolation is that I will be able to say I did not give up. Maybe it will come to something.

Pessimistic Realist

Juan Cole does not have much faith in America even as he hopes for better in the Arab world. I would like to think he's wrong but have nothing with which to dispute his facts or analysis.

It's Official?

In aWashington Post analysis of US-China space program relations:

For now, the U.S.-China relationship in space appears to mirror the one on Earth - a still-dominant but fading superpower facing a new and ambitious rival, with suspicion on both sides.

That same statement accompanied a the headline, "Mistrust stalls U.S.-China space cooperation" under a photo of a rocket on the Post's Sunday morning rotating headlines.

That's a pretty blunt headline for a mainstream medium. The quote caught my eye yesterday when when the headline was just "mistrust" and far less prominent. Today the fading quote is on the front web page--for a while, a least.

It's a message seemingly at variance with the usual American boosterism. Fading is not a part of our national ideology. But in fact, the real spirit of America has traditionally been our practical ability and common sense. Those traits and skills can serve a fading America (which is simply America, still a very rich nation with a skilled labor force), competing with other rich nations in an economic environment where American and economics and interests are not universally held.

Fading does not have to mean the end of American prosperity.

The Past is Prologue

Henry Clay, speaking of John Tyler, in 1842:

We could get along with a man who was only a fool or knave, or mad but the extraordinary occurrence of all three of those qualities combined in one person is intolerable.

Which got me thinking about the past administration. George Bush is the fool. Dick Cheney is the knave. Donald Rumsfeld and the claque of neo-conservative armchair warriors are the mad man. A perfect storm of incompetence and delusion with consequences as grave as any occasioned by John Tyler. The only difference is that modern Americans find this somehow tolerable.

The quote is from Henry Clay: the Essential American by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler. Almost 500 pages plus 70 pages of notes and sources extensively chronicle a long public life. The story reads well and details the issues, politics and personalities of America in the early to mid-19th century.

Accounts of politics in the latter years of that era would easily characterize politics today. The manipulators and misinformers from those days would have no difficulty competing, once they understood the technology, with contemporary practitioners. Or vice-versa.

It's Always Worse in Tight Times

The Washington Post reports that the poor are increasingly with us but the political class is largely unconcerned.

The reluctance of political leaders on both sides of the aisle to directly confront the fact that growing numbers of Americans are slipping into poverty reflects a stubborn reality about the poor: They are not much of a political constituency.

"...poor people don't vote in great numbers. And they certainly aren't going to be making campaign contributions. That definitely puts them behind many other people and interests when decisions are being made around here."

Among those who do pay attention is Washington Congressman Jim McDermott. He must not be part of the political class. Good on him.

More One Party News

This time from Bad Attitudes:

Regardless of party or ideology, every President has tried to accumulate power. As our economic system concentrates wealth, the political system designed by the founders tends to concentrate power.

On the Margins

Jim Webb gets it half right when he talks of "marginalized" white Americans put at disadvantage by "state-sponsored racism". Webb is correct when he states that many whites face the same difficulties as black Americans. What he gets wrong is the cause. Poverty among whites is not the result of state-sponsored racism. State-sponsored corporate economic policies are more the reason. Those policies are not racist. They are simply predatory. Neither race nor official preferences are protection from a winner-take-all economy where few are winners.

Black and white Americans have always suffered from economic disadvantage. They shared a common interest in ending exploitation and injustice. But race kept them apart, keeping a majority from acting in their common interest. Divide and rule has long been a successful model for minority rule.

Webb's remarks come at the end of an interesting week. Race bubbled to the surface of public discussion with the on-line lynching of a black official. Her merest hint of racial hostility and resentment toward whites earned an immediate dismissal from office. In contrast, white officials with verified histories of discrimination against blacks were never fired. State-sponsored racial animus does not flow against whites in this picture.

Race relations were on my mind before the week's events. I finished reading Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War in which the former war correspondent explores the contemporary landscape of the Civil War. Among the re-enactors, neo-Confederates and endless memorials, Horwitz finds a racially divided society, each with its own history. I was not entirely surprised. Most of my life I lived in proximity to black Americans but not with them. These days I hardly live near any blacks. Still, I was disappointed that the gulf is remains so great.

Race and class have bedeviled America since our earliest days. We seem to still have a long way to go. Simply electing a racially mixed president is not enough.

Dollars and Sense

I love it even more when someone talks like this.

Only professional liars could cite concern about debt as reason to oppose a health care bill reducing the debt -- and then vote for debt-expanding defense budgets. Unfortunately, professional liars are the norm in today's politics, not the exception -- and they're leading America off the fiscal cliff.

God and Crumb

R. Crumb illustrates the Book of Genesis but it's still a grim tale.

Crumb himself has written: "I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good. For me to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize I am one of them, I want to scream in horror."

Not unlike the God of Genesis beholding the depravity of his children, even his greatest servants. Abraham pimps his wife, Sarah, Jacob cheats his brother, Esau. How very Old Testament. Faults are very few in the heroes of the New Testament. And an angry, smiting Jehovah is transformed by the Christians into a god of love. There are times when Genesis reads like a tell-all, one of those enraged bits of revisionist history that tell us George Washington was actually a drug-addict or Emily Dickinson was into sadomasochism. Except nobody revised Jewish history to make it the way it is in Genesis. And it has remained not as a guide to transcendence into heavenly realms, but as a description of life as we see it every day in our neighborhoods and newspapers.

Genesis doesn't need an R. Crumb to provide perversity and failure. It's got enough all by itself. This is one reason that Crumb could play it straight with his art, no cloacal Snoid comedy, no gratuitous sex. Yes, there is sex -- men and women are shown discreetly coupling. But no irony, no joking around here. Just one pen-and-ink panel after another until Joseph -- he of the coat of many colors -- dies and the book ends.

How strange it all is, how ordinary. How biblical, how Crumb.

It's an Age-Old Story

If you ever want to know why government regulation fails, you can do no better than to consider this statement about the Federal Reserve:

The Fed's performance was undercut by several factors.... It was crippled by the doubts of senior officials about the value of regulation, by a tendency to discount anecdotal evidence of problems and by its affinity for the financial industry.

Shocked! I tell you, I'm shocked.

Evil Roots

Bad Attitudes has a very good piece on Iraq as a laughing matter this past week on the Colbert Report. Two sentences particularly resonate with me.

We know, down inside, that our soldiers are being used as de facto mercenaries for venal contractors or pawns in the service of grubby political aims that have nothing to do with our freedom or security. (emphasis in original)

That certainly sums up my military service back in the day. I knew that going in and it's gnawed at me ever since. Which is why I am so angry to see the my country is doing the same goddamn thing all over again.

The second sentence is a 1795 quote from James Madison:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few… [There is an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and … degeneracy of manners and of morals ... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Now think of the past six decades and ask yourself how well America has pursued this founder's vision.

This all begins with Stephen Colbert but the point is that war is America's everyday normal.

No Secrets

As America looks uneasily into the financial abyss of world that few can comprehend, everybody is wondering how we will continue to pay for the life to which we are all so accustomed. So far, all the money seems to be flowing toward maintaining what we have, a natural inclination, but only as good as the sustainability of that system.

America's transportation system (motor vehicles and highways)is now facing a sea change in financial assumptions. We've funded highways primarily based on the assumption that fuel consumption will continue to rise. Last year, for the first time, consumption dropped, reducing available funding. Since EVERYONE in America favors reducing fossil fuel consumption in the future, it's no surprise that policy makers are looking at alternate financial arrangements.

One of these is mileage-based transportation taxes where vehicles record and report distances traveled and fuel stations add tax accordingly. Privacy advocates object to a system that would document individuals' movements so precisely. They have a point but they are way too late. That system already exists for virtually every American. It's called your credit/debit card. Look at your statement for the past few months or years and it's pretty easy to track where you've been. I'm pretty sure cell phone records can also provide equal or maybe even better documentation.

I would prefer that my movements and whereabouts not be recorded but as long as I engage in normal commerce, a record of those transactions will exist. Hell, the government already knows when I purchase fuel. I use my debit card rather than stand in line behind three people buying god knows what.

Privacy advocates have good reason to be concerned. It's just that the game is pretty much over.

Excuse me now. I need to get some cash from the ATM.

Far Better Said

...than I can. If you want objective facts about Israel and Hamas, read Henry Seigman's article in the London Review of Books. And check out Eric Alternman in The Nation to see what happens to journalists who depart from the mainstream consensus in support of Israeli war aims.

(hat tip to Jerome at Bad Attitudes)

American Business 2008

The headline says it all. US to sell $6bn in arms to Taiwan. America sells weapons. Not schools. Not vaccines and medicines. Weapons. Implements whose only purpose is to destroy. Our contribution to "help improve the security of the recipient and assist in maintaining political stability, military balance and economic progress in the region".

Pox Americana.

Short Timer

Way back in Vietnam, everyone longed to be “short”, to be getting close to that all important DEROS (date expected return from overseas) Day when each soldier’s war would end. (Unlike the current war, most GI’s only served one tour in Vietnam.) The DEROS count began the first day in country and ended at zero (or maybe even two if you got a quick flight out). At least I thought it ended then. Ever since, the notion of short has been part of my life. All things pass; time and change are inevitable. These passing events individuals and places may not have the certain duration and clear trajectory of military service but they happen nonetheless. Throughout life I have often been a short-timer as I moved from place to place. I knew that for sure when I lived on the Navajo reservation—no matter how long I stayed I would never be truly permanent in that place; that’s one reason why I enjoyed and savored it so much.

More recently I realize that I am becoming a short-timer in this life. The idea is nothing new--I’ve known that life is not permanent pretty much since I learned of death during my childhood. What I didn’t know about the uncertainty of life before I went to Vietnam, I learned there. But these days I can look back at the years and see more behind than in front of me. In Vietnam, that tipping point was cause for celebration (as was every day before and after). I don’t know when that tipping point occurred in my life but as an American male at age 60, I can reasonably assume that I passed my tipping point. I’m a short timer.

At this point in life, even the long term looks like the short term. Maybe longer than shorter but clearly a relatively short time compared to my previous years. So all those things I always wanted to do but haven’t will need to come to pass if I’m going to do them. For practical matters, I give myself another good 15 active years but that may be only a hopeful guess or pessimistic realism. My time could already be up and I just don’t know it as I write this. (Returning to this piece after a few days, I’m still alive, so I haven’t hit the trip wire yet.)

So what does this short-timer plan to do with those precious remaining years? I’m going back to full time employment. A combination of opportunity, challenge, income and benefits makes this a good choice for a few years. It will certainly offer an excellent introduction to my newly adopted state and further my goal of returning to “successful unemployment” in the future. I can also look back to seven years of freedom and interesting travel. I have no regrets about those years or my choices for the next years. I am where I want to be doing what I want.

Mostly. I will no longer co-host About Face on KPHX radio or appear on radio with the Olympia Veterans for Peace. My new employment requires that I be nonpartisan, objective and independent. I don’t think my veteran’s activism affects my ability to meet those requirements but I know well enough that anonymity is to my advantage. Besides, I don’t plan to give up on radio—or television, for that matter. I have some opportunities to develop a show based on my work as a veterans’ advocate and a possible documentary about traumatic brain injury. All I have to do is pass the VA test I took yesterday, master studio equipment and develop a format. I also want to begin photographing again not to mention painting and just experiencing the world around me and enjoying the company of friends and family. I have plenty to keep me interested and occupied.

But my clock is ticking and will stop someday. Fact of life. When I was a Catholic schoolboy, I worried constantly about death and eternal punishment, a feeling that became impossible to avoid when I discovered sex. Since I could not ignore sex, I gave up on Catholic doctrine which freed me from my fear of death as I came to understand my place in the cosmos and other forms of spirituality. Since then, my death has been an event that I know will occur. In the meantime, I can simply do my best to contribute to my community and refrain from harming others. If I do that, whatever comes after death is of no concern. Honesty and respect are important because that is how I define my humanity. It’s just the right thing to do. Period. Not because I fear some eternal punishment or seek some celestial reward. I’m no saint—I don’t always act honestly and respectfully—but I do know right from wrong. Heaven and Hell are irrelevant.

Unlike Vietnam, I am not anxious for my tour in this life to end quickly. Like Vietnam, I can’t do much about it. Well, okay, I can refrain from walking on the edge of sheer canyons since life has taught me that gravity is not always my friend. But even with reasonable prudence and judgment, I will die, probably within the next 30 years or so. Or maybe I will live to be 112. That still puts me past the tipping point.

Call me short. In the meantime, I have a few things to attend to.

Taking Matters into Your Own Hands

Arranging a funeral is never an easy task. Many years ago, I led a team conducting a performance audit of the Arizona Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers. During that project I learned much about the ways of the business and the efforts to reform some of its more egregious practices. Central to most of the concerns was the fact that bereaved families are often unable to deal with the vagaries and uncertainties of funeral planning, often incurring expenses that they would otherwise think about more rationally.

All this comes to mind as I watch Maggie arrange for her mother's funeral. I won't go into the details other than to say that she does not feel she is getting straight answers to from the cemetery where her mother will be interred. Due to uncertainties regarding the grave, where Maggie's grandparents are already buried, the cemetery opened the grave to determine what space is available and what will be needed for a third burial. Even so, the answers Maggie has received are frustratingly vague. Maggie, being an individual unwilling to settle for those vague answers, conducted her own inspection.



























You can always do better with first hand information.