I Am Not Going To Church This Sunday

So I hear that Donald Trump has made the following statement:

"The president just demanded places of worship reopen for in-person services and he talked about guidelines being issued for “communities of faith”. 

He wants them open “for this weekend”. Called upon governors to life quarantine restrictions relating to religious gathering places.

“If they do not do it I will override the governors,” he said.

He then turned on his heel and left the White House press briefing room without taking any questions.

Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany then brought up Deborah Birx, response coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, to the podium for an expert briefing."

 - Quotes retrieved from the Guardian, 22 May 2020.

I've got news for him: I'm not going to church this Sunday.  I will not be celebrating Memorial Day in crowded places.  (I will not be celebrating the 4th of July at all.)  I will not be going to indoor, sit-down coffee shops (like the Starbucks near my house which opened its doors today for the first time in several weeks).  I will not go to restaurants.  I will not go to national parks.  I will not attend sporting events.  I will not join in this idiot's pretense that life is normal.  Because it's not.  Due to Donald Trump's malignancy and incompetence, we have the following situation:

• A pandemic has dealt (and continues to deal) a crippling blow to our economy.
• The people who to date have borne the brunt of the deaths resulting from that pandemic are people whom Trump and his white Republican murderers have targeted for destruction.
• There is not yet a viable, proven vaccine available for COVID-19.  (Yes, I know that a certain American biopharma manufacturer is boasting of optimistic results - but their data have not been rigorously peer-reviewed.)
• There is not yet a viable, proven antiviral drug that is effective against COVID-19.  (Yes, I know that the manufacturers of remdesivir have boasted of minor reductions in disease severity and length of hospitalization - but many doctors and scientists have questioned the methodology of the U.S. remdesivir study. (See this and this.)  And yes, I know that Donald swears by hydroxychloroquine, but I suspect that not a drop of it has passed through his lips.  How might the world look if he did really overdose on some fish tank cleaner!)
• There is not yet any kind of widespread testing available for coronavirus infection.  A Washington State-based group that had developed a free, accurate test kit that could be used in people's homes was asked this week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to halt the use of their tests.  On the other hand, the FDA has granted authorization to a Texas firm to provide in-home test kits - but those who want a kit must jump through a few hoops first.  Why am I not surprised?  Donald Trump has already made it abundantly clear that he is opposed to widespread testing because of the possibility that the test results will indicate that the United States is experiencing a crisis for which the Republican Party has no answer.
• Those states and regions which have ended social distancing restrictions are now seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases.  As a result, there will be further spikes in death rates.  Again, not surprising.  Throw lit matches into a dry meadow in the middle of summer, and you will have fire.

In calling therefore for churches and other places of worship to open this Sunday (and in threatening to force them to open whether they want to or not), Trump shows not only his ignorance of the Constitution, not only also his ignorance of the Bible (Matthew 4:7, "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test"), but most importantly, his ignorance of the realities of trying to reopen a nation and its economy without dealing with the issues that forced it to close in the first place.  Those realities are excellently explained in an article by Jonathan V. Last titled, "We Cannot 'Reopen' America."

On another note, I've noticed that Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic is not just an isolated case of insanity.  Rather, he is typical of all of the global Far Right leaders who have come to power (many of them with the help of the Russian government) over the last several years.  Thus Boris Johnson's Britain became an outlier among those nations which consider themselves in any way European, in that Britain came to have the largest number of COVID-19 cases of any country in that part of the world.  And Russia, which has long aspired for a return to greatness, now has its wish for greatness fulfilled in a sense, in that it now has the largest number of COVID-19 cases of any nation on earth except for the United States.  (We're still No. 1 - Go, USA!  Or let's not!)  Moreover, both Putin and Trump seem to be reading from the same playbook in that their national health response to the coronavirus has been characterized by scapegoating of foreigners, political posturing, and chaos.  One way in which Putin's government differs from Trump's is that Trump merely bullies and browbeats medical experts who contradict him.  Putin, on the other hand, seems to have lost a few dissenting doctors who mysteriously fell from windows over the last few weeks.  They didn't slip on their tea, did they?

Update: I need to add another country currently being trashed - er, I mean, ruled - by a far-Right leader: Brazil.  Jair Bolsonaro has just earned the dubious distinction of leading his country to overtake Russia in COVID-19 deaths and confirmed cases.  That means that Brazil is the new global No. 2.  This confirms my hypothesis that everything the Far Right touches turns to used toilet paper.

Puerto Rico - A Humanitarian Disaster

The Federal response to the hurricane which recently devastated Puerto Rico is not unexpected.  Indeed, it is symptomatic of the disease of a large swath of American society - a swath who are full of empathy toward those victims of Hurricane Harvey who happened to be wealthy and white - yet full of sleepy neglect or overt hostility toward everyone else.  Now that sleepy neglect has hypnotized many Americans (but not a majority, thank God!), lost as they are in their individualism and addicted to their consumerism, while the overt hostility issues forth sporadically from the current President like projectile emesis from an infant who has been burped too vigorously.  Note, though, that the hostility is provoked only when someone manages to break through the President's own sleepy indifference and his perverted preoccupation with himself.  Then, if you are that someone, watch yourself, lest you get yourself spewed on.

Meanwhile, a lot of people in Puerto Rico are about to die.  This is not because there are no Federal resources available to help them, but because the Federal government is now run by a bunch of rich and incompetent pigs.  Decent people who have the means to find out the actual situation on the island (and not the sanitized FEMA version) should be appalled.  Those evangelicals who supported (and continue to support) the President should take a look at the last half of Luke 16 before they go to bed tonight.

But let's not stop with just being appalled.  Let us do what we can ourselves to contribute to disaster relief in Puerto Rico.   The President, like an alcoholic absentee father, has made himself unavailable to provide for the common good.  Here is a link to a page listing organizations to which you can make a donation for the relief of the suffering of the people of Puerto Rico.

The Seventy-Five Percent

Well, well.  The last few weeks have been quite a headache indeed, or to say it in Spanish, dolor de cabeza.  I hope that snatch of foreign language managed to burst a few blood vessels in some of the redneck types who voted for Trump.  What is interesting is that many media mouthpieces (including a number in the alt-media who should know better) are painting Trump's capture of the White House as some sort of populist phenomenon.  Such spewings are typical of people who can't do basic math and who find facts to be inconvenient.  If you find yourself in that crowd, let me help you out tonight.  I'm going to give you a few straight-up numbers.

First, the number of people of voting age in the United States was 247,773,709 in July 2015, according to the Federal Register.  Of this number, 62,210,612 popular votes so far went to Trump.  That means that Trump is the choice of only 25.1 percent of all people of voting age.  Secondly, Hillary Clinton leads Trump in the popular vote by over 2 million persons. Third, there are widespread reports of voter suppression in many of the states which Trump "won."  (See this, this, this, this and this for instance.)  Note also the huge contradiction between exit polls and "official" vote tallies in the first source cited in the parentheses.  This means that if the election had actually been a fair and accurate representation of the will of the people of the United States, Hillary Clinton would likely have won by a decisive margin.  Trump is not particularly popular; therefore his capture of the White House is not a populist phenomenon, but a sign that the arch-narcissist Trump and his backers have taken a dump on the electoral process.  Goodbye, democracy.  It was a nice illusion while it lasted.

Now comes the reckoning for the mess these people have begun to make.  And I already have some idea of the kind of mess they are likely to make.  I am thinking particularly of a parable from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 18, namely, the parable of the unrighteous judge, who is described thus: "In a certain city there was a judge who did not fear God and did not respect man."  It is interesting to note these two characteristics of the judge: first, that he refused to acknowledge any moral restraint higher than himself to which he was answerable ("a judge...who did not fear God..."); and secondly, that he refused to acknowledge any relational restraint by which he might be bound in his dealings with others ("a judge...who did not respect man...").  The characteristic of many people who are like this judge is that although they don't acknowledge moral or relational restraints, they do at first recognize and acknowledge what I call "technical" restraints - that is, the restraints imposed on them by physical reality itself.  But as they continue in their career of evil, they cease to recognize even these restraints.  That process has already begun in Trump and company, ever eager to emphasize their feelings over actual facts.

A day may come, however, when they come to appreciate the following lines from Tolkien: "I wish I had known all this before," said Pippin. "I had no notion of what I was doing."  "Oh yes, you had," said Gandalf. "You knew you were behaving wrongly and foolishly; and you told yourself so, though you did not listen. I did not tell you all this before, because it is only by musing on all that has happened that I have at last understood, even as we ride together. But if I had spoken sooner, it would not have lessened your desire, or made it easier to resist. On the contrary! No, the burned hand teaches best. After that advice about fire goes to the heart."  Or, to put it another way, the outworkings of damnation do eventually catch up with every soul or nation that insists on being damnable.

Meanwhile, I ought to explain my absence from blogging over the last few months.  It has been partly because of busy-ness, partly because after finishing grad school, the thought of sitting in front of a computer has been mildly distasteful.  But the biggest reason has been that as I have watched the unfolding of events in the United States over the last few months, it has seemed that the best use I could make of my time was to devote myself to prayer.  I still feel that way.  However, I may also blog some more in the next few months - particularly about some concrete steps I will be taking to help disadvantaged people who must live in the age of Trump.  One thing I won't be doing is buying anything for Christmas.  Feel free to join me in a year-end shopping boycott if you'd like.  You'll save yourself quite a bit of holiday stress!

I also intend to practice as much non-violent, passive resistance as possible.  Maybe I'll make a bumper sticker which reads, "I BELONG TO THE 75%."  Feel free to join me in passive resistance, if you feel so led.

The Slow Rolling Crisis of Legitimacy

Barack Obama was recently quoted in regard to what he termed the "slow-rolling crisis" of unarmed people of color being murdered by police in the United States.  He did not, however, use the word "murder."  While he he expressed his nuanced concerns over "too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions," he was very quick to unequivocally condemn the increasingly violent reactions to the ongoing police killings of unarmed African-Americans. 

The trouble with all of this is that the "troubling questions" mentioned by Obama have equally troubling, yet perfectly obvious answers.  The problem with mainstream America is that many Americans are engaging in a game of dodge 'em with the truth.  The dodges fall into one of two categories.  The first category consists of closing one's eyes, plugging one's ears, and singing "La, la, la" as loudly as possible whenever anyone suggests that the United States is an inequitable society founded on murderous white supremacy, and that oppression and unjust treatment are alive and well today.  The "La, la, la's" become especially loud whenever the U.S. is about to attack, destabilize, bomb or otherwise harass a country whose overthrow might provide some economic benefit to the plutocrats who run things here.

The other dodge category consists of excusing the inhumane treatment of minorities by exaggerating their criminality or lying about the circumstances of their deaths.  This kind of lying was fairly obvious in the case of Michael Brown.  But there are even more egregious examples of lying, including some which predate Brown's murder.  For instance, there is the case of a Hispanic teen in North Carolina in 2013, who supposedly shot himself in the head with a hidden pistol while handcuffed in the back of a North Carolina police cruiser.  (A neat trick, that!  Better than Houdini!)  A more recent example of creative fiction is attempt by certain voices to downplay the impact of organized police violence against the Black American community by saying that the problem of "Black on Black crime" is far worse.  Such people quote former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's claim that 93 percent of Black murders are committed by Black perpetrators, and that this statistic proves that we are indeed a dangerous, criminal race.  However, actual statistics paint a far different picture.  See this, this, this, this, and this for example.  And be sure to read the linked articles in their entirety - unless you'd rather sing "La, la, la" as loudly as you can with your fingers in your ears.

Both dodges are scale-free characteristics of narcissistic abuse.  For instance, you can see the same wilful ignorance of trauma inflicted, or self-justification of trauma inflicted, on the part of domestic abusers.

Back to Obama.  He is in an interesting bind, having been supported in 2008 by a broad spectrum of people who saw the ruinous direction the U.S. had taken under his predecessor.  Instead of fulfilled "hopes" for "change", what we got was a genial apologist for the continuation of those same policies.  In 2009, blogger Dmitry Orlov compared Obama to Gorbachev, saying of him that he is"...the smiling face behind the crumbling imperial façade, the personable, non-threatening loser."  To the Black American community, Obama's mission was to be a pacifying, genial token.  But reality had a way of rendering his tokenism ineffectual.  (By the way, Obama's disease is characteristic of the entire Democratic Party.)  Had he been an honest man being "held hostage" as many of us believed during his first term, he could at least have been honest enough to refuse to run for re-election.  But now many even in the Black community no longer care what Obama says; he's become irrelevant.

And so we come to a few further comparisons between the Gorbachev of the end of the Soviet Union and the Obama of today.  As the senile apparatchiks of the Soviet Union staged a putsch to restore themselves and their empire to its former glory, so senile redneck rich people in this country have hijacked the political process in a bid to restore their supremacy to its former glory.  Ultimately they will fail, but not before they seize every opportunity to make a mess that someone will have to clean up afterward.  Slow-rolling crises have a way of boiling over.

As for me, I seek as much as possible to be a pacifist.  (These are my Boss's orders.  Matthew 5:38-41.)  But if I can in any way help the current American system to survive and thrive, that help is henceforth withdrawn.  And I will seek to disconnect from that system as much as possible.  Both it and its owners are illegitimate.

My Resilient Neighborhood, Part 2 - A Homeschooling Experiment

In my last post, I said that as teaching has become an integral part of my strategy of personal resilience, so it has become the mainstay of my outreach to my neighborhood. I also began to describe my efforts in teaching guitar to some of the kids in my neighborhood. In this post I'd like to talk a little about a few of my motivations for teaching these kids.

Much of what has been written about building resilient neighborhoods has focused on the psychological, relational and social aspects and benefits of building community. So it is that many posts on building resilience have focused on the social power of collaborative efforts such as group cannings, neighborhood block parties, people meeting to sing together, and so forth.

Believe me, I value these aspects just as much as anyone else, and I see their importance. I think particularly of the human element of working with children, and how emotionally stretching such an exercise can be. Anyone who has taught kids (and who has cared whether they learn or not) knows that working with kids can break your heart sometimes – or be the source of some of the best experiences in life at other times. (The anticipation of those “best experiences” is what keeps me going.) I also think of how good it has felt to befriend some of my neighbors – especially those who are not originally from the U.S. – and for us to begin to learn to rely on each other.

But to focus only on the psychosocial or relational aspects of building resilient neighborhoods turns many resilience-building activities into mere symbolism rather than practical actions that can meet practical needs. Therefore I have also focused on the practical applications of initiating an neighborhood teaching effort. I am thinking particularly of a C-Realm podcast I heard of an interview with Jeff Vail back in July 2010, in which he described how the “nation-states” of the world are in decline due to the failure of various “states” (national and sub-national governments) to live up to their social contract to care for their constituent “nations” (that is, the people who actually live within the notional borders of the various “states.”) Of course, we can see that the failure of the social contract between states, especially in the First World, and their constituent nations is due to the hollowing out and wholesale ripoff of these states by the wealthiest members of the constituent nations.

What this means is that the median members of various nations are seeing their standard of living and quality of life being gutted in order to maintain the wealth and prerogatives of the richest members of those nations. Government programs and institutions which were created in order to raise the quality of life of all are now being gutted in order to maintain the wealth of society's richest members. The government's sole remaining claim to legitimacy is that it controls the official, visible market of the official, formal economy. However, the abandonment of median citizens by the state is opening a huge door for the emergence of a parallel, “diagonal economy” consisting of locally-created alternative arrangements for median citizens to get their needs met, or, as Jeff Vail puts it, “...for highly networked groups of scale-free, self-sufficient communities to begin taking care of themselves within the crumbling or increasingly irrelevant auspices of [the State].”

What does this look like where I live? Well, one parent I know told me a few months ago of her concern over the Portland school system's decision to cut school hours and class offerings for her elementary school kids. Social institutions such as public schools have already been largely turned away from providing median children with a real education, and now in many states the small benefit that public schools provide is in danger of being removed entirely due to strapped state budgets. The failure of the State to provide for the education of its median children (i.e., the vast majority of children who are not from rich families) opens a door for local, volunteer-based, grassroots educational solutions.

But the test of a “diagonal economy” or the emergence of local, grassroots alternatives to services no longer provided by the state or its official institutions is that these alternatives must work at least as well as the things they are replacing or supplanting. Otherwise the emergence of a “diagonal economy” or local alternatives is nothing more than useless symbolism. Thus it is that in my efforts to teach guitar, I am actually trying to teach guitar. I aim to make my lessons fun, engaging and relational; borrowing a page from Ivan Illich, I try to create a convivial learning environment. But I also am doing my best to make sure my students know all the chords in first position, how to tune a guitar in standard tuning, how to read music in standard notation, what a time signature is, what a key signature is, how to fingerpick ergonomically so that they don't develop tendinitis, and how to play interesting and challenging pieces.

This is all being done pro bono, after hours, informally, and I think it is the way a lot of people in a lot of neighborhoods are going to be doing things as they seek to meet the educational needs of their own neighborhoods. Moreover, if I can get away with providing a rigorous, technically exact basic education in music in this way, it will prove to me that I can also teach other subjects in this way – necessary subjects like mathematics, biology, basic Mendelian heredity including plant-breeding, small livestock husbandry and other subjects pertinent to a post-Peak future.

This leads to the question of what sort of subjects would make a good curriculum for post-Peak education and how rigorously those subjects should be developed. Although some writers have already tackled this question, I'd like to add my two cents. But not tonight; I've got to practice guitar for a bit.

Meretrix Activists

I want to know what became of the changes

we waited for love to bring.

Were they only the fitful dreams

of some greater awakening?

I've been aware of the time going by,

They say in the end it's the wink of an eye

And when the morning light comes streaming in

You'll get up and do it again,

Amen.

– Jackson Browne, The Pretender

I was thinking recently of some of the geeky things I did as a kid. Some of those things were expressions of nascent idealism and activism. My family was living in Southern California and I had become convinced that the place had to have a decent, modern mass transit system. So I ripped some blank pages from a class notebook and penciled a paragraph at the top of one of the sheets stating that I was collecting signatures to make the Government give us all a slick, technically advanced monorail system. (Those weren't the exact words I used – hey, I was only twelve years old at the time.)

I took my “petition” around to a couple of supermarkets and a nearby Thrifty Drug store, and asked the store managers if I could ask people to sign up for a modern mass transit system. I don't know what impression I made on them, but they all said “No.” So I knocked on people's doors and asked for signatures. I even managed to get a few. But to this day I can't remember what finally happened to my “petition.”

That experience formed a picture in my mind of participatory democracy as an expression of the energies and choices of motivated, idealistic people freely volunteering their time for causes they believe in, and manifesting their belief in the championing of both candidates and the citizen-sponsored initiatives that are supposed to be the backbone of direct democracy. But lately that picture has fallen apart. It's not as if someone threw a rock suddenly at the picture frame, but rather that the entire picture has been left out in the rain for a while.

I'm thinking of the last several months, and how my old employer was slow and very light on work, and then there was a period where we were so light on work that I stayed home for about five or six weeks. And I was diligently scouring Monster.com and Craigslist and other venues for employment offers. I am an engineer by schooling, but I have to confess that I looked at some of the other headings under “Jobs” on Craigslist. One such heading was titled, “Nonprofit Sector.” From January until just a few weeks ago, this heading was chock full of announcements that ran something like this: “ACTIVISTS NEEDED! $9-$14/hour,” or, “Fight for Change and Make $$$!”

To be sure, such ads generate a response. I got to meet several of the people who responded to these ads over the course of the late winter and spring. They tended to congregate on MAX trains, collecting petition signatures from a captive audience as we all whisked from station to station. Or a person could run into them at a New Seasons or Whole Foods market or at Trader Joe's, or in front of a post office, or at the Lloyd Center mall. Some of them seemed to be representatives of genuinely counter-cultural, grassroots organizations. And some of them actually seemed to believe in what they were doing. I am thinking especially of several petitioners I met who were collecting signatures for some medical marijuana initiative. (Now that's “grassroots”! But I didn't sign their petition, sorry to say.) I was also glad to meet people from the Bus Project.

There were also signature gatherers whose masters had a more troubling agenda. For instance, there was a group gathering signatures for a new casino east of Portland under the premise (and promise) that this casino would benefit schools, police departments, parks, and other public agencies. However, the backers of the casino initiative are in Toronto, Canada, and they have spent over $800,000 to insure that their measure is on the November ballot. I met a lot of signature gatherers working for this initiative, including one group a few weeks ago consisting of newly-hired canvassers on a side street who were being given an open-air training talk in the art of “selling” their petition to potential signers. (I have to tell you, they reminded me of a flock of pigeons converging on a loaf of bread.) I asked a couple of them how they found out about this job, and whether they knew anything about the petition for which they were about to collect signatures. Craigslist works wonders, doesn't it?

Then there was the usual suspects from Vote Oregon out collecting signatures for initiatives sponsored by Kevin Mannix, Bill Sizemore and Loren Parks. One such initiative, Petition 13, would impose mandatory minimum jail/prison sentences for certain felony sex crimes and driving under the influence convictions. I saw some of the “Vote Oregon” operatives at work selling this initiative, and they were slick - “Would you like to sign a petition to keep sex predators off the streets?” Who wouldn't say “Yes!”? There are only three problems, however. First, they don't tell you what laws exist at present to provide the very protection they claim their initiative will accomplish. In other words, maybe we don't really need this initiative. Second, the fine print of their initiative targets things other than sexual predation. And that leads to the third point, namely, that Mannix, Sizemore and Parks have long wanted to create a prison-industrial complex in Oregon just like that which exists in California, because they see prisons as a lucrative growth opportunity for themselves.

The thing about almost all of the signature gatherers is that they were all paid. The money came from somewhere. It was a lot of money. It would be nice to think that all that money came from altruistic souls giving their bounty of spare change to altruistic, civic-minded nonprofits concerned only for the common good. But the reality is that in too many cases, the money came from “point sources” – individuals or small groups of individuals with a lot of wealth and a vested interest in using the political system to generate a little more wealth for themselves. Anymore, it takes a lot to get an initiative qualified for a state ballot. And states are populous, big places. And getting people to notice your petition takes a lot of expensive advertising. My run-ins with signature gatherers were yet another reminder that the political system in the United States is almost wholly owned and run by wealthy people, whose sole aim is to engineer the system for the maximization of their own personal profit. Almost gone are the days of true grassroots activism of the kind that makes kids draft petitions and knock on doors just for the fun of it.

I won't even get into the funding that goes into candidacy, except to say that over the last month I have become rather frightened by everyone who is running for political office, both locally and at the Federal level. I recently rode past a big sign saying “We Need So-And-So for Governor!” and asking myself, “Just why do we need So-and-So? Who's paying that so-and-so to run for office?” Here's what would be very nice to have – political candidates who told us all the straight truth, who said, “I make no promises to 'fix' the economy and bring prosperity back again. Those days are over. American society in general and our locality in particular face an unavoidable contraction of the official, formal economy, due to resource depletion, environmental degradation, and the resulting collapse of our debt-based financial arrangements. All I can offer is to tell you the truth, and to arrange our government in such a way as to facilitate your adaptation to our new reality.” It goes without saying that there are no candidates willing to say such things, and few voters willing to hear such things. It's the people who promise the moon right now – and the people dumb enough to vote for them – who scare me.

Some bloggers have proposed a boycott of the next elections, and a few of them have gone so far as to say that such a boycott might withdraw enough support from our corrupt political system that it crashes. It would certainly be nice to have a government that had been rendered incapable of ruining our lives. But if you want to crash the system, a voting boycott is not enough. Some systems react strangely when lightly loaded. If there were a massive voting boycott in this country, who knows what kooks might make their way into office? It would be easy for the wealthy to find a few people who were willing to vote a certain way in exchange for a few bucks, thus buying an election and guaranteeing that our government continued to be a government by the rich, for the rich.

If one really wanted to withdraw his support from our present government, he would have to go farther than choosing not to vote. He would have to take away the power the government has to accomplish things and to funnel wealth to the wealthy. The removal of this power could be done legally, but it would be painful. For it would require that people chose to live very frugally – thus reducing the money that flowed to large businesses via the mass participation of consumers in a consumer economy. Secondly, once people drastically reduced their expenditures, they would have to drastically and voluntarily reduce their income. This would reduce the revenue available to the Government via taxes. Not many people are willing to take the first step. Even fewer are willing to take the second.

In All Fairness To Barack Obama...

Some of them knew pleasure, and some of them knew pain,

and for some of them it was only the moment that mattered.

And on the brave and crazy wings of youth, they went flyin' around in the rain

and their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered.

And in the end, they traded their tired wings

for the resignation that living brings

and exchanged love's bright and fragile glow

for the glitter and the rouge.

And in a moment they were swept...

before the deluge.

– Jackson Browne, Before The Deluge

The President of the United States has been the subject of some (seemingly) searching media examination lately. Both Time and Newsweek magazines have featured articles describing Obama as a stymied president facing challenges that may well be insurmountable. Even our own newspaper, the Oregonian, jumped in with their own two cents' worth.

Opinion in the street has not been altogether favorable to Obama lately. I remember how I had misgivings about him even as I voted for him, and even as I defended him in conversations with some of my acquaintances who were true believers in Fox News, the National Enquirer, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. This last Christmas, a relative (who believes to this day that Obama is a Muslim) asked me again what I thought of him (this question was related to health care “reform”). When I said, “I think he's a liar,” you should have seen the look of triumph in my relative's eyes. That look of triumph made me angry, however, as I didn't want to have to go into a fact-based defense of my statement in the presence of someone who feeds on professionally-spun rumors.

Me, I think it's time to give Mr. Obama a bit of a break – but not too much of a break, because, unfortunately, I still have to be truthful. So let's talk a bit about the challenges facing this President of the United States at such a dark time for the nation and for the world, and some missteps that could have been avoided.

In all fairness to Barack Obama, the mess into which he stepped by becoming President is not a mess of his own making. Many of the trends which comprise this present mess began before a lot of us were born – including Obama. Free-market predatory economist Milton Friedman had already hit his stride by the time Obama came into the world. The liabilities of our present industrial society were only beginning to be discussed in the 1970's – a time in which Obama was just turning from a kid to a teenager, learning to shave and to drive. The arrangements of empire by which Europe and the United States exploited the rest of the world have been decades in the making.

The politicians whose rise to power facilitated America's state of denial about limits to growth entered office while he was still a college student. I think particularly of Ronald Reagan, who was aided and abetted by his friend across the Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher. Obama was far from the centers of power that gave us Reagan, Bush the First, and Bill Clinton, and was thus not in much of a position to do anything about them.

By the time Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate, America and its leaders had already begun to decline. Our manufacturing had largely been outsourced, our technical work was beginning to be outsourced, our main exports were starting to consist of “financial products” instead of real goods, the gains of the Civil Rights Movement were being quietly reversed, we were already fighting wars of hegemony (such as Bill Clinton's invasion of Haiti), the rich were claiming an ever-larger share of the nation's wealth and were in fact running the country while the rest of us were being trained to “aspire” to ever more lavish lifestyles, even though we were getting poorer, our resource base had long since started declining and we were having to buy more and more things on credit. By the time Obama became a U.S. Senator, the country had become mired in an unjust war of conquest in Iraq, and our collective debt was already becoming unsustainable. This was all taking place against the backdrop of the end of cheap oil and the resulting stresses on the American society and economy, and the first real beginnings of the derangement of our planet's climate. Anyone who became President in 2008 would have had one huge mess to clean up.

But in all fairness to Barack Obama, (and by “fairness,” I mean telling it like it is), I have to say that many of us who voted for him in 2008 did so because we realized that the U.S. and the First World were facing limits to our way of life – limits so profound that they would require a total change of our way of life. We clearly saw the problems we were facing – resource depletion; the decline of our “prosperity”; the blood on our collective hands and the unwillingness of other, poorer nations to allow themselves to keep getting jacked in order to keep America fat, dumb and happy; the destruction of the environment due to our excessive consumption and industrial activity.

We correctly identified these all, not as mere “problems” that could be solved by technology or trickery, but as a predicament to be gracefully accepted and endured. And we looked at Bush, McCain and Palin, and the Fox News/neocon/neoliberal crowd as children who were refusing to acknowledge reality. We saw in Obama the possibility of an adult who would speak the truth, who would tell us, “We're not going to return to the glory days of unending prosperity. It's not right that we should want to. We're in for a difficult time. Let's learn to gracefully adapt to it; I'm here to help you and to lead by example.”

Instead, he lied to us.

Just like all the Presidents from Reagan onward. And he proved to be a stooge of the rich, just like the members of the other branches of the U.S. Government and all the major political parties. Which is why there are American troops still in Iraq, there are American troops in Haiti and Colombia and the African continent and Afghanistan and Kyrgystan and Kazakhstan, there are still torture bases in Guantanamo and elsewhere, and any country that has things we want is bound, sooner or later to be described in our media as a “terrorist threat.” Oh, and the rich (especially those on Wall Street) are still getting bailed out by the Federal Government, and the “official” unemployment rate is still below 11 percent, but real unemployment is much higher. And atmospheric CO2 is at nearly 390 parts per million and 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record, globally.

And yet, in all fairness to Barack Obama, he only told us the lie that most of us wanted to hear. It's the lie being told by every major American political figure, as well as their media mouthpieces – even though the finer details of that lie differ from liar to liar (and they fight convincingly over those minor details). It's the lie that our present troubles are “solvable” in a way that would return America to prosperity or “keep America strong!” without forcing any fundamental change in our way of life.

I am thinking just now of some conversations I've been having with people who identify themselves as conservative or sympathetic to groups like the Tea Party, who get their news and views from Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Some of these people even claim to be "well-informed." Yet they all cling rabidly to the promise held out by ultraconservative American politicians and organizers that say, “Support us, because we have The Solution. You don't have to give up your way of life. The threat to our American Way comes from them liberals and illegals and dark-skinned people and foreigners and socialists and scroungers and 'terrrists' who hate our freedoms! If we just get rid of these people, we can have prosperity forever!” In the event that these people actually seized political power in this country, they'd simply install their own liar as spokesman to tell them the kind of stories that are about to be swiftly be disproved by reality.

But the so-called American “Left” is just as much to blame in talking about clean coal, carbon capture, the promise of renewable energy and unbridled faith in the power of technology to grant us unending prosperity. I think of a guy I know... (But then, I'm trying to stop talking widely about these things around some people. Talking just makes me a bit of a pest, not to mention making me mad. Maybe I should duct tape my mouth shut.) Anyway, this guy regularly listens to KPOJ, “Portland's only progressive talk station,” where he regularly hears that the reason the economy is falling apart, the ecosystem is dying and people are jobless is because of the greedy Republicans, and that somehow a better system run by Democrats would solve all problems while guaranteeing prosperity for everyone.

It is true that many of our problems are being exacerbated by greedy rich people in places of power. But the underlying problems would still have to be faced by all of us anyway. Whenever I mention resource depletion and the resulting inevitability of the decline of the industrial economy, this guy's eyes glaze over.

So Obama's a symptom of a larger problem. We want to be lied to. We are facing a predicament, but we want to be told that it's merely a problem, a solvable problem – so we can continue driving our Escalades and Suburbans and Explorers and Yukons and Expeditions and monster trucks, so we can continue aspiring to be rich and living gluttonous and materialistic lives without thinking that such lifestyles must soon end. No matter who was President, we'd have quickly turned him into a liar. And it would soon have become obvious that he could not keep his promise to "solve" our problems.

Christmas 2009 - Notes From The Road

I just got back from visiting family in So. Cal. The trip was an interesting experience, but then again, it always is. It's amazing what a guy notices when he moves away from a place and only returns for occasional visits. This time, I dropped by a former neighbor who lives in a house almost directly across the street from where I used to live. We got to talking about people we both knew, while a couple of his grandchildren showed me their new puppies and their Christmas presents.

He told me about another neighbor who sold his house a few months ago, for a bit over $250K. The man was forced to sell his house because of the lifestyle he had lived during the good years of the Southern California real estate boom. He had added a couple of rooms on to what was originally a Korean War vintage, two bed, one bath house in a working-class neighborhood, and had decked out the interior with genuine tile floors, granite countertops and the works. He had also bought an RV, two all-terrain tricycles, an SUV, and a boat in addition to his work truck. He paid for it all by refinancing his home loan with an adjustable-rate mortgage. He ended up owing a few hundred thousand more than he paid for the house when he bought it. When the mortgage reset, he could no longer afford the monthly payment. Even though he was able to sell his house and relocate, he is still massively in debt.

Of course, I had known that our present economic collapse would be hard on many Americans who had made foolish choices because they were seduced by wanting to live rich. But my friend began to tell me about his own situation, a situation of unavoidable hardship caused by economic contraction. My friend is originally from Mexico, and does not have a college education. He does, however, have a great deal of common sense, and he has chosen to live within his means. He too has a two-bed, one-bath Korean War vintage house, and he is paying only the original mortgage he received when he first bought his house. But his employer is slowing down and may close the place where he works. If that happens, he too will be forced to move.

This was sad news to hear. But it did provoke a discussion of true wisdom in these times, and the art of living happily without a lot of money. It also showed how sharp my neighbor is. As I said, he is originally from Mexico, and did not go to college. His English is not that good. (My Spanish is much worse, believe me!) Yet when, over two years ago, I put my house up for sale, I remember him coming by and asking why I was moving, and I explained to him all that I was then finding out about Peak Oil and the fragile state of the American economy. He got it. Every word. This is much better than I can say of many college-educated Americans I have talked with over the last two years, men and women who refuse to examine the back story behind the illusion of wealth in which we all have lived for the last few decades, and who refuse to believe that it's all about to end. My friend, on the other hand, is a clear-eyed realist. He still gets it.

For this trip, I drove down and back, as usual. (I no longer entirely trust flying.) I noticed that a lot of rest stops in California are now closed. Also, there didn't seem to be as many Highway Patrol cars as usual. I am sure that this is due to California's budget “crisis.” But these things got me thinking on the return trip, as I was driving north past Bakersfield and before Sacramento. On that particular stretch, I was listening to a podcast I had downloaded of a presentation given by a man named James Howard Kunstler to the Commonwealth Club of California in March 2007. (For those who have heard that podcast, it's the one where at the end, Kunstler doesn't realize that he's still being recorded and he asks the chairman of the club, “Where's my mug?” Maybe they give commemorative mugs to their guest speakers.)

Mr. Kunstler had stated in his talk that social systems organized on a giant scale would get in trouble in an era of economic contraction. Those closed rest stops were just one sign of the trouble that California is in. But those closed rest stops made me ask what the citizens of California were actually getting in return for their tax dollars. For they had been asked to accept severe cutbacks in State government services in order to balance their budget, yet they were still required to pay taxes. I know that money is not going toward maintaining a safety net for Californians, because many of them have been trained to regard government safety nets as evil. And they surely are not building that high speed rail line that voters approved in 2008.

Anyway, it seems that we all, including those of us in government, will have to quickly learn the art of living happily without a lot of money. As the benefits provided by government at all levels continue to shrink, this will mean that we must do much more for ourselves.

The Limit of F(x) As x Approaches C(ollapse)

Ooh, a storm is threatnin'

my very life today,

If I don't get some shelter,

Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away...

– The Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter

I have previously stated that our present global economic and political systems are breaking, due to a declining resource base and a deteriorating natural environment. I have also stated my belief that the masters of these systems are not interested in fostering or even allowing local, resilient alternatives for ordinary people. Instead, their aim at present seems to be to maintain the present systems at all costs, and to force ordinary people to continue to rely on these systems.

The present economic and political systems are also predatory and catabolic, in that they tend to devour large numbers of ordinary people in order to enrich the masters of these systems. While the enrichment of these masters has also historically come through economic and industrial expansion, the base of natural resources necessary for this expansion has begun to contract, because many of these resources are now used up. Because the base of natural resources is now contracting, there is no longer the opportunity for large-scale economic growth. Therefore, the catabolic, thanatoeconomic character of our present systems will become more prominent, as the rich will only be able to maintain and increase their wealth by jacking increasing numbers of the poor.

I have come to believe that under these circumstances, it is not possible at this time for most people to build truly resilient, permanent communities that are immune to trouble from economic collapse. There are some sectors of the population (such as those who are very well off) that will be able to form such communities. Yet most people will be prevented from achieving this because of crippling loads of personal debt, as well as the desperate attempts on the part of banks and government at all levels to keep prices of essential assets so high that obtaining them requires taking on additional debt. In short, most ordinary people are finding that most of their resources are being taken from them by rich predators, or that most of their resources are going toward defending themselves from these predators. The best that individuals and communities can do is to achieve a sort of “relative” resilience based on having a multitude of skills and strategies for coping with a rapidly changing economic and political situation.

This changing economic situation is increasingly looking like a hard crash. Our present system is unsustainable, yet its masters will not willingly choose a sensible, orderly and equitable transition to a state of lower economic activity and energy use. Rather, they will try to maintain the status quo until they simply can't anymore, and then some things will break down catastrophically. A good question is when that breakdown will occur, and what will be the limiting conditions which force such a breakdown. We might also ask what such a breakdown will look like.

As far as limiting conditions go, there are several authoritative thinkers who have written about these things. Rather than trying to reproduce their work, I'll merely offer my summary two cents' worth. My focus will primarily be the United States and its government at all its levels. The limiting conditions I see are as follows:

1. Government debt. As debt increases without bound, so does the yearly revenue required to service that debt. (To service debt means to make the regular payments with interest that are required as part of the contract between borrower and lender to pay off the debt.) When the revenue required to service the debt exceeds yearly taxes taken, governments must default. Then, no more debt is issued, the creditors come knocking, and governments collapse or cut their spending drastically.

2. Post-Peak Oil. Crude oil production is inextricably linked to the output of industrial economies. If the world is post-Peak and oil production is falling, the global economy must contract. This is especially true of the United States. As the American economy contracts due to a declining resource base, the ability of the various levels of the American government to borrow more money or to service existing debt declines. This pushes us further toward default and collapse. (By the way, when estimating the severity of future oil supply constraints, I rely on the German Energy Watch Group's Oil Market Report predictions.)

3. Food supply collapse – due to climate change and other environmental degradation, and post-Peak Oil. There is a real possibility of food shortages in the First World within the next few years, due to the collapse of agricultural water supplies because of overuse, misuse and climate change-induced drought. (See http://www.theecologist.co.uk/News/news_round_up/293297/colorado_river_running_on_empty_by_2050.html, and http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-climate-farms22-2009jul22,0,7564338.story for instance.) Famine will also reduce economic activity and hinder the servicing of government debt.

4. The present, ongoing economic contraction consisting of business failures and hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs each month. This leads to more loss of income, more loan defaults on private debt and more bank failures. Of course, those who hold the debts of people who have been thrown out of work will not want those debts to become worthless – thus more lenders will call for more “bailouts” (i.e., transfer of bank debt to Government books). Yet the Government is getting closer to being caught in a maxed-out condition where further debt transfers become impossible.

5. The collapse of the powers of the corporate state. As government access to debt collapses, so will government ability to try to protect big business from incurring loss (no one will be able to afford to pay the bulldozers to knock down abandoned houses anymore, for instance, nor will any government be able to afford to enforce anti-competitive laws against small farms and small food producers).

6. The pledge of dis-allegiance if the Government tries to increase its ability to service debt by means of an excessive (confiscatory) tax burden on the poor and middle class. Should we tax the rich? Absolutely yes! But so much of the Government's activity of late has been to burden working class taxpayers in order to secure the wealth of the top 5 percent of the American economy. (Think AIG and Goldman Sachs, for instance.) This can go on for only so long.

What will a breakdown look like? I have a pretty good idea of what it will look like at first in many neighborhoods, as it is already starting to happen. First, there will be a rare, small number of people who have prepared quite fully. Chief among their preparations will be the elimination of all debt. (This is why I say they will be somewhat rare. Within the last couple of years, I have met only two other people who have paid off their houses.) These people will increasingly find themselves the odd men out (or odd women out) in neighborhoods where many people's homes are getting repossessed and becoming vacant. Also, those who still have a “job” in the conventional sense will increasingly be a minority. Lots of neighbors will suddenly have lots of unplanned-for “free time.” There will also be more store closures, so that it becomes harder for people in a neighborhood to obtain the things they need. There will be an increase of homeless people as well, and as time passes, an increase of renters or squatters. Neighbor whose house is paid for, meet your new neighbor: the squatter or renter who just moved in next door. In this state of flux, there will be a great need for wisdom, tact, politeness and diplomacy in forming new relationships. For perceptive souls, these conditions may also present opportunities for “culture repair.”

What are effective strategies of personal and group resilience for such conditions? The answer depends on whether one intends to stay in a particular place at all costs, or become a migrant. “Should I stay or should I go?” That depends on what holds you to a place. “If I stay, but if I owe,” what should I do? Develop a suite of alternative gigs in case you get laid off. Make sure that whatever you do, you make enough to pay down your debt. “If you stay and you don't owe,” this gets easier – you just have to worry about utilities and property taxes, as opposed to a mortgage. If you rent, most of this still applies – develop a suite of gigs that earns enough money so that you can pay your bills. In all cases, reduce other expenses so that you have enough money for the essentials. (Note: this will involve learning a fair amount of self-reliance skills.)

Why a suite of alternative gigs? Because the official economy is no longer willing or able to guarantee an income to a person who simply pursues a single career or profession. As an example, this last week, I was riding a MAX train home when I ran into a co-worker from my office. We talked about the fact that both our departments are very, very slow right now, as well as strategies for dealing with possible layoffs. He is a piping designer by profession (as in piping for large industrial plants), but he is also a sports referee. If my office shows him the door, he's got a large number of games lined up where he can referee and get paid for his services.

But are you already out on the street – have you fallen from “respectability” due to loss of income? There are strategies you can pursue for protection and mutual aid. I will have more to say about these strategies in a future post. Some of these will be useful not only for those who are homeless, but for other groups usually targeted by our predatory system.

One thing I must emphasize: I am a Christian. Therefore I believe in an absolute moral standard. I will not therefore ever suggest turning to certain criminal or unethical deeds as a coping strategy.

Tarnish On The Golden State

Much has been written and said lately about the budget crisis in the State of California, and the drastic cuts in government spending needed to address the budget shortfall. Though I am a recent transplant from California, I still have a significant interest in knowing how this story will turn out. A few things come immediately to mind.

First, I'm curious to know how the growth in the prison-industrial complex contributed to this crisis. According to the 2009 Budget Act, the Corrections budget grew by nearly 30 percent from 2005 to 2009. This is even though FBI statistics show that at least in 2008, the number of crimes per capita fell. Now the Governor is proposing drastic cuts to the corrections budget, and the draconian “3 Strikes” laws and other harsh punishments sponsored by right-wing firebrands and approved by California voters are proving to be both impractical and unaffordable. However, the Corrections Corporation of America remains hopeful that business will turn around for them. (See http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-crime2-2009jun02,0,7051335.story and http://seekingalpha.com/article/136300-corrections-corporation-of-america-q1-2009-earnings-call-transcript)

Second, the Governor is saying that because of shortfalls in revenue, all sorts of social services will have to be eliminated, as well as state parks, libraries, school aid, medical care and so forth. If these things must go and yet the State is still receiving money, I wonder then what expenditures they will actually keep. Their revenues may have been less than desired, but they are not zero. What are the citizens of California going to get for their money?

Third, I wonder if the impending loss of services is due to Californians being just as pressed by financial problems as everyone else, and thus being unable to afford the taxes necessary to keep their current social services. Or is it that Californians have gotten used to getting something for nothing? The same right-wing firebrands who have pushed draconian criminal penalties have also successfully thwarted many attempts to increase taxes over the years. (Proposition 13 is an early example.) How will the citizens of the state respond when they can no longer get something for nothing?