US politics

Oh for some commies and populists in Congress

Capitalism, Life under Capitalism, US politics
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Trollblog looks wistfully back at the Congressional elections of ’36:

We’re headed into The Second Great Depression. Almost no one in our present political establishment has any clue as to what’s happening or what to do about it. Most of them are bought and paid for, and the vast majority are jellified lackeys who are incapable of any initiative on a topic more substantial than earmarks and constituent service.

Our political elite is offering us two choices. Obama, Summers, and the machine Democrats propose that we give finance almost everything it asks for, wait for things somehow to get better, and start thinking about squeezing the money out of Social Security and “entitlements” somewhere down the line. Meanwhile the Republicans and Blue Dogs are hoping for Obama to fail so that they can take over and institute “Hooverist” austerity measures immediately. (These are really Mellonist measures: Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate…. purge the rottenness.)

You’re asking yourself: “Does Emerson really believe that a Communist or a thuggish populist demagogue would better serve the American people than the actual Congressman I do have?”

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. 10-to-1 your Congressman is worthless.

What I see locally is that even most of the supposed leftists have internalised the neoliberal consensus of the past thirty years regardless of whether they agree with or not, hence now this consensus reality is shown to be false they’re clueless what to do. The same people who bought into privatisation are still in power and they’re fundamentally unable to solve this crisis because they cannot think outside of this outmoded consensus.

The US withdrawal from Iraq

Anti-war, US politics, War on Iraq
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Let Jon Steward explain it to you:

On a more serious note, it was clear long before he was elected that Obama was never going to be the great anti-war president we would like him to be. He was smart enough to see that the War on Iraq was a bad idea, but he’s still steeped in the ideology of American exceptionalism and has surrounded himself with hardline foreign policy hawks; Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, undsoweiter.

On domestic policies he may well turn out to be the most leftleaning president of the last thirty years (which isn’t hard) but as post-war history shows, space for “radicalism” at home is often bought through hardline foreign policies. With Obama there will be less of the bull in the chinashop foreign policy practised by Bush and his cronies, there will be more international outreach, more of the sort of stuff Serious Liberals find important, but the fundamentals of America’s foreign policy won’t change. My prediction is that at the end of his term, the US will still have significant forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We’re dooomed — but it’s not the end of the world

Economy, US politics
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Dmitry Orlov lays out the realities of the coming collapse of the United States and what you can do to survive through it:

So that’s what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting “Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!” Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won’t be funny: what is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don’t recommend passively standing around and watching the show – unless you happen to have a death wish.

Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their Scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way to get a diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke of change, but in reality they are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next.

So, what is there for them to do? Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

There you have it, a real message of hope and cheer for everybody. Don’t blame me, blame Blood and Treasure.