Speechifying Hogwash—or Hope—Whatever

Let me make my inaugural address as succinct as possible—

So what?!

Yeah, I know it's a big deal that somebody other than a starched-white piggy got elected to chief wielder of the vast nuclear arsenal, thus of the world, and it's really great that a half-black Hawaiian has broken through, but as you know I'm just not that hopeful.

That innate sense of reasonableness, or curmudgeonly virtue, that guides my passions respecting a changing of the demagogue, led me to review a feature at the NYTimes today, where you can go waste some lifewidth reading all the inaugural speeches of past demagogues (the American ones anyway).

For example, it is with great delight you will note how George Washington, figuring he'd already made, at extraordinary length too, all the points he had to in the first inaugural speech, including whining about not feeling all that well, shortened his second inaugural address to basically saying "Here am I again, swell, and if I fuck it up, be sure to let me know."

Poor Thomas Jefferson, who was so good at making hopelessly unrealistic ideas sound so charming and possible, actually prophesied that it would be perfectly OK for those who didn't like the new union to voice their opinions about breaking it up (presumably to go slaving without federal oversight), because their talk, if countered by rational counters, could be safely tolerated.

Uh-huh.

And then, that shameless stylist of the sardonic, Abraham Lincoln, riffed off Jefferson's notion of reason and toleration being key to union, to promise in effusive terms, that by the gods he wasn't going to get rid of slavery, OK?!, and you know if one of those Southern-owned pieces of chattel ran off to the North, he'd be more than happy, and legally bound too, to send that not-quite-human thing back to its proper owner in Dixie. And can't we all just get along, Southern dudes?

Of course, Lincoln knew the Southerners, particularly those crazy mofo's in South Carolina, wouldn't believe anything he was saying. So he added a little promise, that if anybody proved Jefferson wrong, and maybe reason didn't counter secession so well, there would be hell to pay; because he, Lincoln, was just as resolved to return runaway slave-states back to the Union as he was to return runaway slaves back to the South.

By 1865, and the second inaugural speech, Lincoln and the nation(s) had seen an apocalyptic amount of blood and destruction, and Abe was even more explicit about his intention of enforcing laws and virtues. On the one hand, he promised the Southern leaders that if necessary, he was fully prepared to utterly impoverish them, and to kill every last rebel. He blames that attitude on God's sense of justice of course.

But then, he notes what will happen if the South just acknowledges its erroneous ways, and beaten condition, and comes on home peaceful-like:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations"

Nice words, huh? And how nice would it have been if any of them had even a spare thin dime's worth of relevance to human beings and their behavior.

Instead, the United States pissed into the giant blood-bucket of its enormous and ghastly Civil War sacrifice, letting the South, and of course the North too, entirely off the hook for the moral point of the war—freeing the slaves—and condemned millions of US citizens to over a century more of second- or fourth-rate treatment, as bad in many cases as if they had remained slaves.

Thing is, what Lincoln really seemed to be saying back in 1865 was that he didn't want to be backwards-looking, or to hold the South too accountable for having started a terrible war it couldn't win. Lincoln sounds kind of like Barack Obama right now, wanting to "bind the nation's wounds", and look after all the poor warriors, no matter what side they were on or what horrible misdeeds they may have performed.

No "just and lasting peace" befell the United States after the Civil War. Just a peace of exhaustion. People were tired of fighting, and certainly they were going to be tired of hearing about the plight of former slaves and their descendants in America for a very long time.

Today, finally, maybe the sweet-toned, hopeful parts of Lincoln's words start to come true, just a little bit. And maybe even, the Civil War—that mid-19th-century American one anyway—will finally be over.

Maybe so.

That doesn't mean Barack Hussein Obama is going to be a good leader, or that the world will be better in a few years for his having become chief magistrate of the vast nuclear arsenal.

I am skeptical, as you know.

But at least there is some chance, as with Lincoln's words, that a reasonable ideal might start to become real. So, see you in the year 2153 when that happens again.

Inaugural Cynicism

I have seen a number of people arguing lately about what Barack Obama needs to say to the nation in his inaugural address; how he needs to speak some magic words that will restore some hope and some trust to the nation.

Well, if those magic words exist that would restore those things, I hope Obama doesn't know them, and will not speak them, because the last thing we need from yet another president (YAP) is to have him coerce or con the people into mindlessly surrendering their right and duty to be skeptical of their masters.

Of course, if the people mindlessly do such a thing, who is really to blame about that?

The last thing in the world we need right now is to trust any leader to do the right and just thing. It seems they do not have it in them in any natural way to do that. Perhaps it is all the lies they have to tell just to get elected, or the lies they have to tell to do anything, and more importantly to get away with the doing. And election after election, no matter how much they've been lied to, the people stupidly believe the politicians and hope they will fulfill their promises.

Right now, a large majority of the American population is so convinced that Barack Obama told them the truth, and that he will deliver on all of his major promises, that Obama's own henchpeople are now worried that maybe they have set the bar war too high in terms of expectations. That is one reason Obama came out a couple of weeks ago and basically said "get ready for a depression."

Anyway, no matter what Barack Obama says; no matter how gloriously symbolic it will seem to so many people when he takes office; no matter how conciliatory and upbeat and anti-divisive Obama manages to appear; the problem is that after he steps away from the podium, he isn't going to perform the obvious first function of a responsible new leader—hand-cuffing George Bush and Dick Cheney and holding them for their war crimes tribunal.

You see Barack has already sworn off that backwards-looking attitude where you investigate your predecessors, no matter how evil they may have been, and how destructive to the republic, and the rest of the world. Nope, after all, America is positive and forward-looking. It never wastes time reflecting.

That's why America so deserved the presidency of the master unreflector, George Bush II.

You want to read something funny? Sure you do. Well, just ponder these words for a bit. They were spoken on January 20, 2001, by George W. Bush at his first inaugural, you know the one he took after not being elected to the office he was occupying.

Bush blither-blathers a whole lot about things near and dear to his heart: civility, compassion, responsibility. You probably recall how much those things played a part in the incredibly successful presidency of George W. Bush. Especially that last one—responsibility. Now, Bush was really interested in encouraging the notion that ALL citizens needed to be responsible. Of course what Bush meant by that was that ALL citizens needed to shut up whining (you know about being poor for example) and invest in the stock market—or hey, buy a house with no money down and no income to pay for it. Yeah, that's the ticket to responsibility.

He also spoke about his own principles:

"I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility, to pursue the public interest with courage, to speak for greater justice and compassion, to call for responsibility and try to live it as well."

To advance his convictions with civility, Bush had at his disposal such civility-meisters as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. To pursue the public interest with courage, Bush had at his disposal the United States military—which is to say the courage of somebody else's sons and daughters. To speak for greater justice and compassion, Bush employed the angelic minds of people such as Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo. And to call for and live responsibility (which should imply accountability), Bush thankfully had to get on with his life and didn't waste time with that "reflection" thing.

Fortunately as well, Bush was favored first with a goose-stepping Republican majority and then with a pack of cowardly Democrats in Congress, who did absolutely nothing to help Bush reflect upon his principles.

And now, it seems Barack Obama is going to let the whole principled crew of Republican unreflectors off the hook. Hey, it might be divisive and upset a conservative zealot or something. Better to worry about our futures, and what does the past have to do with those?

Principles? Responsibility?

That's for people like you, you hopeless fool. Not for your masters.

Get back to work. Somebody needs to pay for a fatcat bailout.

Hey, and don't forget to watch BHO's inaugural speech.

Bet it will be very inspiring! Very distractingly so!

War Is Torture

Great Depression 2.0

And a happy new year to you, too.

It was not so long ago, back in the merely dire times of September, 2008, that I noted how in a few strokes of a pen or button-pushes, the US feds had given away 1.4 trillion dollars in a week. They did this hoping to prop up or save the world's fast-sinking economy, and especially of course certain allegedly key elements of it, like huge banks (and more importantly the fatcats to whom the pols are eternally indebted).

Wasn't it heartwarming after all to see George Bush, and the remains of his once powerful Republican majority (now barking fascism from its minority jaws) see the error of its capitalist ways and just start printing money to give away to poor, desperate—rich people? Oh yes, in a nanoblink of time, especially compared to decades of hateful indifference to the poor (or hell, to the middle-plebs too) sponsored by the Republican starched-whites, Bush and his henchcreeps gave away as much of the federal ranch as they could manage to the very mobsters who had crafted and exploited the financial meltdown.

Any money for the plebs?

Nope, just reassuring words about how important it was for the feds to bankrupt the nation while saving the pirates.

Well, that was back then, and as we know, the USA sucked up one big wad of phlegm to spew into the face of the Republicans on election day. The party that dedicated itself to the moral destitution of the United States had finally fallen to those puny pugilists, the Democrats. And, crazily, but sensibly, the nation was getting to elect somebody who could actually use the Internet! And of yeah, the people decided to cast against tradition, and elect a fellow who would make a lot of Southerners and people in Utah pop a hemorrhoid, or their cosmic eggs.

Now, a question a lot (but hardly a majority yet) are asking is whether Barack Obama and his team of competing interests can formulate and then get passed any substantive changes to the economic reality, anything that will actually save us from the thing so many people do fear—a Great Depression 2.0.

I would like to report to you that I think everything is going to be OK. Actually, that is not true. Nothing has ever been OK. I think it is an impossibility that it should be able to be so for a very long time, assuming we could ever arrive at a fair definition and distribution of OK.

So, I would not like to report that the world has fallen into a state of pious lotus-eating. Nope. I know that economics asserts that some people will have enough, and others more than enough, and some poor wretches much less than enough. I also however know that "enough" is fluid, that the bar is constantly raised (or was so—maybe that is changing too), that the people with more than enough can go with a lot less so that the less than enoughs get a little more.

Anyway, one hopeful constant I had observed up to this point in our little journey into the heat and heart of utter darkness, is that at least nobody responsible, or mainstream anyway, was saying we were going to have a Great Depression. No, it would just be a bad time, a really bad time, or maybe like the worst bad time in oh, 75 years or so, but hey it wouldn't be like Great Depression bad. No way!

Even somebody like Paul Krugman, who won his Nobel Prize last year in some part for correctly asserting that the sub-prime bubble would bring on a major financial crisis, had avoided saying that even at the worst were we looking at GreDep 2.0. At least, that was the case up until yesterday.

In an op-ed in the Monday New York Times, Krugman noted something that a lot of people had also noticed but were trying to mostly ignore counting as significant. The trillions of dollars the feds have thrown at the financial crisis may have gotten thrown, and caught too, by some grateful fatcats, but the promised payoff for this immense largesse, of stabilizing things so that lending would start again and the economy could begin a recovery, has not happened. Nope. In fact, things are getting steadily worse—and especially if you include evaluations of the economies of the world, which are collapsing everywhere.

As Krugman says: "The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in the United States but around the world. Manufacturing, in particular, is plunging everywhere. Banks aren’t lending; businesses and consumers aren’t spending. Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression."

Krugman notes that what has been happening over the last year, and especially the last few months is an experiment (unfortunately, conducted on 6.5 billion lab rats) in contrasting the economic ideas of Milton Friedman to those John Maynard Keynes.

Krugman assesses: "Friedman’s claim that monetary policy could have prevented the Great Depression was an attempt to refute the analysis of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that monetary policy is ineffective under depression conditions and that fiscal policy—large-scale deficit spending by the government—is needed to fight mass unemployment. The failure of monetary policy in the current crisis shows that Keynes had it right the first time. And Keynesian thinking lies behind Mr. Obama’s plans to rescue the economy."

Krugman concludes that Obama's plan, focused as it is on providing a large economic stimulus through public works projects, is likely to meet with considerable resistance in Congress, certainly from Republicans (whose only hope in regenerating their dying party is to try to sabotage Obama's policies) and even from Democrats, who may battle for a long time over how exactly the piles of cash will be spent, and especially over which states will get the choice works projects.

Another question is just how much money the US can spend to solve the immediate economic problems, before the huge debts being incurred begin themselves to present an obstacle to economic recovery.

Recall I mentioned that 1.4 trillion dollars so easily spent back in September?

Well, if you add together all the money already thrown by feds in an attempt to make things better, and then you also add the current estimates of what Obama wants to do—which of course could go up before his part of the spending starts, the figure comes to:

Eight trillion dollars!

This year's deficit (not the debt, which is far larger) for the US government: possibly more than 1 trillion dollars!

And with all that, it just may not be enough to save us from GreDep 2.0.

Keep the faith baby!!—although I seriously doubt if it will do you much good.