The year 2010 may be remembered in retrospect as the year of “if only”. Michael Totten describes “the perfect Iranian storm on the horizon”. The key line of his report is from Jonathan Spyer. “If the U.S. leaves a void here, the secondary powers in the region—Israel, Turkey, and Iran—will begin tussling with one another for dominance.” That void will in the first instance be filled by an Iran backed by a nuclear weapons, which will redouble its subversion behind that shield. The IAEA, famous for blaming America for crying wolf, now says Iran has material for one or two nuclear weapons.
If that were all.
Providing the backdrop to a crisis which even in normal times would be challenging is the second and possibly more dangerous round of the global economic crisis. Societe Generale’s Albert Edwards predicts the collapse of the equities market. In a newsletter distributed to subscribers. To the structural deficit afflicting the bond markets (discussed in the previous post) may now be added the “structural bear”. And it will show its head fairly soon. “The equity market … will crumble like the house of cards it is, when the nationwide manufacturing ISM slides below 50 into recession territory in the coming months.”
Even the Huffington Post can’t completely buy into the Summer of Recovery. It reports that David Rosenberg, the former chief economist for Merill Lynch is describing the current economy as being in a “depression”. One of the reasons Rosenberg gives for the structural downturn is demographics.
The 45- to 54-year-old demographic expanded as a group every year from 1984 to 2010, writes Rosenberg, citing demographic data from Harry Dent, whom he cites as “one of the world’s most widely read demographers.”
Over that 26 years, the stock market advanced 240%.
Starting next year, the age group will contract, according to various statistics, says Rosenberg, and will keep shrinking through 2021.
With regional enemies challenging the new Iraqi government by sending car bombs against the police it is interesting to note that in many ways the upheavals are worse even closer to home. Seventy two persons, perhaps illegal immigrants drawn by a border which politicians refuse to close, were found dead in a Mexican ranch close to the US border.
Things are much, much worse than Mexico in that socialist paradise Venezuela, which the NYT says is far more dangerous than Iraq. So bad in fact that the government has ordered the newspapers not to report any more killings.
In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.
Even Mexico’s infamous drug war has claimed fewer lives.
The NYT seems optimistic that police advisers from Cuba, that other socialist paradise where all problems are solved, will come to turn the tide. Of Chavez one NYT source said, “We elected him to crack down on the problems we face, but there’s no control of criminals on the street, no control of anything.” Only the illusion of control and the illusion of solutions.
In the end the NYT may discover that the Cuba, Iran and China have only appeared to solve their problems by controlling the narrative, a process the Old Gray Lady will be tolerably familiar with. Like the Summer of Recovery, like Hope and Change and probably like universal healthcare, those fictions have for too long been confused with fact. The year 2010 may be the last one in which the old order will have the chance to realize that there really is a problem. As for the solutions, those have not yet come to hand.
Spot on, as always. Your writings keep me sane, in that I am not alone in my thoughts. Check out Victor Hanson’s article today.
“May you live in interesting times.” LOL .
God help us all!
Yes, but there is also opportunity in turbulence. At the interface between regime changes there are always opportunities for those who keep their heads and whits about them. Eyes and ears open and scanning, ya’ll.
The equities market predictions are most interesting and relevant to my personal situation; I pretty much depend on equities for my retirement — which recedes into the distance!
So many analysts have said in recent days that the Dow is headed down to 5 X 10^3 or so, that I am inclined to get out of stocks altogether.
But then where do I go?
In an earlier post, Wretchard, you wrote about assigning a cardinality to each type of infinity (a subject dear to my heart)…
As in, the cardinality of the continuum c is greater than that of the natural numbers, Aleph 0…
As our wealth diminishes, do we assign a cardinality to each of the various categories of diminution?
Jamie Irons
Jamie,
In the vernacular I believe that translates into bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
Structural, hah. They still haven’t figured it out. Goddamn elephant in the living room is going to stomp into hummus every economist and talking head in the country, before they figure it out. None so blind. Hari Seldon would have a cow.
wretchard, the various tyrannies do manage to stomp out crime by the people, in favor of crime by the state. However, I for one consider that progress, of a sort, you don’t *have* a state unless it has an effective monopoly on violence, and if you do have a state, even an evil one, then, um, then you have a state. Is an evil state better than chaos? I dunno. But it’s something more than narrative, I think.
Victor Davis Hanson likens today’s atmospherics to the charged calm before the storm of 1914 and 1939. VDH argues that what characterized those periods was a that the trouble was unforeseen and that those who started it believed there would be few consequences.
That’s true, but there’s something else. Like those periods we live in an era marked by the ‘loss of certainty’. This feeling that ‘the center cannot hold’ or fin de siecle is really another way of saying that we’ve come to the end of linearity. Only ten years ago the biggest problem anyone could anticipate was the Y2K bug. We were at the end of history. The EU was going to dominate the world. There was “Peace Dividend”. In that heady atmosphere the leaders of the world felt very much in control; ready to build their paradise on earth.
And then it all fell apart. September 11 happened, and somehow nothing happened like it should have. Then came the global financial meltdown and the Obama crisis. These suggest that there is no way back. The only way forward is through a crisis we can’t even anticipate. It’s no good even conspiring because things are still in flux.
But if we go back to VDH’s metaphor, what can we learn about winning and losing in a discontinuity? The first thing to learn is that conventional wisdom is our enemy. From 1914-1917 the generals sent men across No-Man’s-Land against machine guns until they realized that it was a bad way of doing business. What pressed down on them was the accumulated weight of Napoleonic military wisdom. They had to unlearn the past in order to survive. For millions, it was too late.
A large part of the solution to crashes is memory management. You have to get rid of bad objects lingering uncollected and feed them to destructors. Or a reboot is going to do it for you. If this comparison is apt then the coming years will be ones in which institutions are going to go extinct under the impact of the crisis. Institutions, but not necessarily men. Men who are free to think things through from first principles can act unfettered by past biases. Above all that means a fast, fast OODA loop.
Here’s my counterintuitive prediction. Countries like the USA are positioned to do better than the Chinas, the Venezuelas and the Saudi Arabias when the crisis hits if their institutions can get themselves out of the way by shrinkage or adaptation. The dinosaurs will die when the asteroid hits, but the mammals won’t.
W: I think your prediction is about right. The big unknown is whether or not our institutions (including the ruling class) will know how to get out of the way, and whether or not they will think the country is more important than their own self. Clearly, they have not decided the last point is correct yet, but maybe when things begin to fall around their shoulders they will. Somehow, though, I don’t see the Chuck Schumers or Barack Obamas of this country agreeing to get out of the way. I hope I’m wrong. . . F
Wretchard,
You are absolutely correct. The one distinguishing feature of America that is not shared by any other nation is that in our history we have completely recreated ourselves three times: 1. Revolutionary war, 2. Civil war and 3. WWII. For america to survive the coming storm it must again re-invent itself or perish. The Tea party represents the soul of the country coming forth to attempt the the next reboot. Once again ordinary people are beginning to do extaordinary things, not for themselves for but for their love of family and country. If history is any indicator it will be very messy and tumultuous, but will be done. The next 10 years will be interesting indeed.
Menidas
The old adage that the only certainties in life are death and taxes forgot to mention the other certainty in life…
war.
If the 1914 analogy is correct, we should be eternally grateful if it only extends to Congress ordering trillions of dollars “over the top” into the blazing maw of bad mortgages. We can unlearn Napoleonic finance, given time, at a relatively low human cost. I am still hopeful. America’s step falters, but our potential adversaries are visibly lame. A firm hand may yet avert catastrophe.
If not, the “Year of Transition” may give way to something else entirely.
It was the year of fire.
The year of destruction.
The year we took back what was ours.
It was the year of rebirth.
The year of great sadness.
The year of pain.
And a year of joy.
It was a new age.
It was the end of history.
It was the year everything changed.
A coalesence of narratives…a transitional time for all of us. Jamie’s reference to cardinal numbers for different varieties of infinity tells me he’s been reading David Goldman’s(Spengler) article about mathematician Kurt Godel in First Things, which hearkens us back to first principles once thought relegated to irrelevance by Spinoza and Einstein. “When in doubt, reboot” goes the techie maxim, and, sure enough, it works…if once isn’t enough, do it over again. When things get info-cluster-f**ked, they crash, and memory management requires a reboot to first principles…K.I.S.S. VDH is a trusty sentinel, reminding us that if we don’t like the weather, wait a few, but keep an umbrella handy. W, I like the phrase “the Obama crisis”. That pretty well sums things up. “Shrinkage and adaptation” are very words of wisdom. As the turn of phrase I learned today goes, that’s “money”.
In fact, we might as well get used to re-thinking currency (pun intended) as to be “that which can be used and/or converted to energy for LIFE”. Shrinking your overhead and your exposure to dependancy on these top heavy dinosaurs of governance is going to increase your adaptability to emergent flocks of black swans. When the internet and other systems of re-supply go down in some EMP event or other, we are going to be reliant on means we have developed that are resilient enough provide work-arounds. Now is the transition time to prepare your OODA loops. http://eazymark.blogspot.com/2008/09/ooda-loop.html
But “for millions, it was too late.”
Anyone besides me curious about the solid gains American utility companies posted today, this despite the Dow’s plummet back below 10K?
Transcontinental Pipelines, Plains All-American, Ferrel Gas, Kinder Morgan Partners…if you need it (and what with Winter about to come on in the Nordland, who doesn’t), well, they ship it, refine it, or store it, and their stock prices are beginning to reflect this.
A consolidation around essential commodities may be underway. People are seeking “safe harbor” in the things that they need. And if they can secure a dividend while moored, all the better.
Gold’s too high, but citizens know (hope?) that, at a minimum, our government will fight to protect our other essential infrastructures, like those indispensible “circulatory” apparatuses that El Paso maintains thru Arizona.
Watch Prudoe Bay Royalty Trust. If she jumps over 100 again, we may be about to go to war.
The BBC’s website has a scary map showing the extent of the drug cartels’ control of Mexico.
The Mexican situation is a nearly perfect example of how basic common sense has been completely subordinated to politically correct lunacy which not coincidentally happens to correspond to the electoral interests of certain Washington politicians. The more Mexico implodes the greater will be the cry to keep the borders open, and the more suits will be filed against Arizona. After all, those refugees are all potential voters. That is short-term optimization at its finest. Screw Mexico, God-damn America, but get them votes into the Big Tent.
An historian of the Somme slaughter described it as case of “lions led by donkeys”. The jackasses are in power. They define the elite. How such a bunch of mediocrities every acquired so much power, fame and influence will be a mystery that future historians can devote tomes to solving. For the moment the job is probably to ease their grip on public policy.
Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear made a very interesting observation about the faddist elite when he asked why ever “eco-car” seemed designed to be hideously ugly. Even the mechanically interesting Prius was intentionally wrapped in a hideous design. Why? Clarkson believes it was because Toyota understood “environmentalists” all too well. They didn’t want to save the world. They wanted to announce their own moral superiority to the universe. And the best way to do that was to run around in something that shouted “I care! I care!” Form versus function? No. Vanity versus everything.
An elite in decline is not about excellence; nor about being way into the right hand tail. It is about being its own inbred self, for that reason and that reason alone. It has learned to love its body odor and its mind has looped around. Another historian of the Great War remarked that it ended the belief that the “Public School boys governed best”. It is always sad to watch the process of decline, especially from what was truly a former greatness.
SteveAZ….
Such plays are in anticipation of hyperinflation.
In hyperinflation you want to be producing the day to day essentials: food, oil, energy, water, repairs, etc.
In hyperinflation the debt the utilities have issued fades from view.
Their current production ( love that pun ) stays with true value.
It looks like the facts are coming home to roost……So to speak.
VDH might well be on to something. The traditional way to end a serious depression is War. It worked for FDR. Wilson didn’t have a real depression to deal with, just a slight downtick. Wilson, like FDR, was as Socialist as any POTUS can be. Socialists love war. It increases their ability to control the population. The left will go nuts on the Obomination, but they aren’t doing him any good anyway.
Congress will stop any attempt at true Socialism, since that would mean Congress losing power. Socialists are sneaky and will run as close to the line as Congress allows.
Off topic a bit, but who do you think the unemployed will vote for? Republicans have 2 months to prove that the blame Bush ploy is a big lie. The facts are there, I just don’t think the RNC is smart enough to use them.
Starting a war would lead to a draft, which would cut back on unemployment. It also would affect unemployment by creating factory workers for all the new war material that would be needed. There are several opportunities out there.
We can count on the Obomination to choose the wrong one.
On a war footing the USA could field about 15 million troops, 20 in a pinch. That is enough to conquer the world, given our technological advantage. If we build 10,000 F-22′s, the per unit will be down to something reasonable. WE have SDI, Stealth and the world’s best MBT. We have the best troops, although 14 million draftees would dilute the quality somewhat.
If the Obomination goes to Congress and asks for declaration of war on Iran, he would get it. That would mean the Democrats keep control of Congress.
The Mexico situation for us in the Southwest is a little like living in Israel except for the lack of Scuds and Katushas. It could get ugly here in a hurry. We had a gang shootout here in Tucson last night in Midtown (might have been just local knuckleheads). I was reading Vicente Fox and Calderon are hinting about legalizing drug use and sales in Mexico. That’s nice but what will happen to all the narco-terroristas? I don’t think they’re going away any time soon. Really might not be any country for old men , or at least unarmed ones.
Hey Skip, This ain’t 1941 or 1917. If there is a Mideastern war it’s apt to be nasty, short and brutish. It might be over before we get over there.
As for the country club Republicans, they are part of the problem and not part of the solution. ALL the old guard that have supported the socialist iniatives since 1913 have to go. Their support of “Institutions” and initeria/control is why the elephant can’t tap dance. Slim down, trim down, de-scloratize the culture/economy/government and let the entreapuneur roam/roar. Either that or we are all toast.
All the white collar lefty’s are really going to have to learn a trade or cage apples on the streets. Maybe philosophy wasn’t such a good major in 1985?
Skip,
I don’t know what type of dream state you are in, but Obama ain’t about to put us on any war footing. But if he wanted to, it would take at least 5 years. Plenty of time for most young men to flee to Canada. Besides, we have a very limited aircraft or heavy arms industry nowadays. Maybe we could buy stuff from Russia or China to fight a war with. In fact, just pay them to fight the war for us. We’ll just pass another few trillion dollar budget adjustments to cover it.
An elite in decline is not about excellence; nor about being way into the right hand tail. It is about being its own inbred self, for that reason and that reason alone. It has learned to love its body odor and its mind has looped around.
Now, now, are you telling me that having a good body odor isn’t important? Why shouldn’t good body odor be a sign of excellence and moreover give members of the club a right to guide the destiny of humanity? [sarcasm alert]
Seriously, self-described elites have declined throughout the millennia. This is nothing new. The problem comes when a society becomes so brittle that a “fallen elite” is able to drag the level of civilization down to their level. Some societies are able to rise despite of or in opposition to such people.
What ought to be the attributes of those who make governmental decisions on behalf of the people? If there is to be even a facsimile of a ruling group, what should these people have in common?
Moreover, what is the best strategy vis a vis an elite in decline – replacing them with a new kind of elite, expanding jury duty for ordinary citizens to encompass legislative and administrative decision making, or promoting a variety of education for a declining elite that arrests their decline?
There are two economic choices facing our leaders, both toxic to politicians, who will refuse to choose either one. Two paths diverged in a wood, and they choose neither . . . .
Via Automatic Earth: http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/
Nonprofits promoting left wing causes seem to be merely another version of a late medieval priesthood, with the narrow mindedness of political correctness replacing the narrow mindedness of scholasticism. The solution found in Protestant regions was a mass nationalization of church property; Catholic regions had a belated version of this during the French revolution and the Spanish Republic. Yet somehow, I doubt that any of us at the Belmont Club want Uncle Sam to confiscate nonprofit foundations.
The divide between amateurs and professionals goes to the very division of the Protestant Reformation, and I don’t think this controversy is going away. The professionalization of the Left does suggest that it is becoming an imitation of Catholicism rather than of various Protestant sects.
“If the Obomination goes to Congress and asks for declaration of war on Iran, he would get it. That would mean the Democrats keep control of Congress.”
The only war the Left wants is a domestic war. It is really amazing that a person as batshit crazy as Keith Olberman actually has a mainstream news show. the man is as crazy as an outhouse rat. Dan Rather might have been just as nuts but at least he was vaguely aware that his private Moriarty’s were not actually visible to the rest of the world and might bear some relationship to his meds. these are indeed strange times.
when you look around the globe at the number of failed states – Mexico, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Venezuela you quickly realize there is very little difference between them and Chicago. The corruption, violence, and general lawlessness and the economic breakdown and disparities are really very similar. how far is California from turning into Mexico or judging from the kleptocrats in Bell from turning into A total kleptocracy? the government there is broke, a huge hunk of the population is illegals, the middle classes are emigrating to other states. it is already failed state. It just hasn’t registered yet.
“It might be over before we get over there.”
It’s never over before we get there. Never.
The phrase “summer of recovery”, which was designed as hook around which to build a PR campaign, illustrates all that is tragic and laughable about the supposedly ‘sophisticated’ and ‘informed’ policy which the “know-nothings” cannot hope to understand.
The phrase only serves to underscore how completely ludicrous and distant from reality the models which drive the administration’s economic policy are. Whoever came up with the idea of a “summer of recovery” campaign forgot that all economists have two hands. One the hand and on the other hand. In that way economists can always have it both ways.
But no. They called it and completely struck out. Not only that, they weren’t even in the right stadium. If any proof were needed of the complete inadequacy of their mental models the ill-reposed confidence in their “summer of recovery” is it. It’s like getting a sack-o-s**t and dumping it on your own head.
Like those cults in which the Mothership does not arrive at the appointed time a wave of nervousness is now sweeping the acolytes of the sect. “Can it be?” they ask, “that the Prophet has erred about the time of the Great Arrival? Perhaps by just a little.” And so they keep on waiting, and waiting, until their outstretched arms tire and fall to their sides. Until finally even the most zealous adherent begins to have his doubts.
Then a cry sweeps the crowd. “Aiyee! It is witchcraft. The evil sorcerer George Bush has put a curse upon the Bountiful One. Aiyee! Behold he counters the spell.” And for a moment the faithful steady in their tracks. The failure has been temporarily explained. But the damage is done. The seed of doubt is planted. And the Bountiful One is playing golf, which only adds to the unease.
Karl Rove stated the obvious. “By overselling the stimulus before its passage in 2009 and exaggerating its benefits with layer upon layer of slippery half-truths in 2010, Mr. Obama has made voters angrier.” What else could he do but oversell the future? A man with no achievements in the past must always offer up the prospect of untold riches to his listeners, just around the bend … just around the next one …
W:
I think part of the reason Obama oversold the stimulus and Obamacare and all his other fancy ideas is that he has so little experience with the real world that he does not know what it actually takes to effect change in a political or economic system. He is truly clueless about the system he is so bravely talking about altering. With so little experience in the real world, he just doesn’t know what he is promising. It’s the way with community organizers: promise the moon and hope some rich benefactor will come along and pony up to make your promises come halfway true, anyway. F
What about other countries? Germany seems to be holding up. Canada too. In Australia savers can get 6-7 per cent in some bank accounts–better by far than our stock market. Why is that? Is there a Restoration Hardware type self fulfilling death wish to trash our economy while everyone watches?
From the head of the Gulf
To the Straits of Hormuz
The ships ply their trade
Fearing the lighted fuse
As the Mullahs grow bold
And the Yanks pack and leave
The Sunnis fear now
There will be no reprieve
For the region at large
Waiting for the big hit
Now the question will be
Do we fight or submit
27 Wretcherd
“Like those cults in which the Mothership does not arrive at the appointed time a wave of nervousness is now sweeping the acolytes of the sect.”
That’s probably the best description I’ve seen yet.
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I think we’ll come out all right in the end. It’s the journey that’s going to be tough.
19. trangbang68
No, wars are never quick. The “short. victorious war’ is a sales come-on, NOT reality.
Large scale wars are all about logistics. Basically, the ME tyrants don’t have the supplies to fight more then a week of high intensity warfare. After that it’s sticks and stones.
Saddam’s army was well supplied by 3rd world standards. Yet a big part of the reason the ‘Thunder Run’ thru Baghdad was so successful was the Iraqi’s were running out of ammo at critical spots. The 3 stooges battle was fought over a supply column.
The chances of the Obomination getting a declaration of war thru Congress are slim. Then again, we are 60 days out and the Dems are looking sorry. No discounting what a desperate Politician will do.
The same argument that the left applies to bombing Iran ( that it will strengthen to Mullah’s hold on power) applies here in America.
And some things POTUS can do on his own. A lengthy bombing campaign of Iran is within his power. He can bomb for 90 days before Congress can close him down.
Hell, if he bombs Iran, I’ll vote for the M*&#$^ F&*@#^. Some things are more important then which crook sits in the Oval Office.
Looking Backward: 2010 – 2032
(With acknowledgement to Edward Bellamy)
A Fantasy — Part 1 (I wrote this about six months ago but thought it too long to post. I am now posting it because much is already coming true.)
It is hard to believe that twenty-two years passed so quickly. Little did we know back then how momentous would be the tide of events. Even I, as a close observer of history, am shocked at how much has changed.
Twenty-two years ago, in one of the most contentious legislative battles up to that date, the House and Senate passed a comprehensive Health Care Reform (HCR) bill that President Obama signed a few days later. At the time Democrats celebrated a new era in which more than 30 million uninsured Americans would be provided with health insurance. The benefits of this bill were supposed to be deficit reduction, reduced health insurance premiums, a reduction in the mortality rate, and increased wellbeing for Americans. However, its promises turned out to be highly exaggerated.
Controversy over HCR was the top issue in the 2010 election. Nevertheless, when the dust settled, Democrats norrowly lost the House but retained a 2-vote majority in the Senate.
By late 2010 and early 2011 a dozen Fortune Five Hundred companies eliminated drug benefits for their retired workers. Those retirees were then shifted to Medicare D, the drug plan provided by the government. These extra costs put an unbudgeted strain on Medicare, creating the projection of Medicare going broke in less than 12 years. To keep Medicare viable, President Obama asked Congress to raise the limit of income that could be taxed for Medicare to $500,000. This bill was approved in the House of Representatives by a 220 – 210 vote and then modified in the Senate so that it would only increase the tax limit to $250,000. To get that vote, exemptions were given to union workers and government workers. The House revised the amount to $375,000 and it passed by means of the reconciliation process the next day by the Senate.
In 2010 Justice Stevens retired from the Supreme Court. An ultra-liberal Asian professor from Berkeley was nominated. The Republicans, who cited Senator Schumer’s 2006 speeches claiming that the filibuster was a legitimate tool to use for judicial nominees, held up his nomination. However, Senator Reid was able to convince the Senate Parliamentarian that the Supreme Court makes decisions that affect the economy and the budget, and therefore that the reconciliation process could be used for ratification of Supreme Court nominees. The Justice was approved by a vote of 52 – 47 with one abstention. For all intents and purposes the filibuster died with that vote.
In 2012 a liberal Justice fell seriously ill and resigned. She was replaced by the first openly gay Supreme Court nominee, who was ratified by a vote of 50 – 50, with Vice President Biden breaking the tie. An even more dramatic event was the conservative Justice’s tragic and unexpected death by a stroke. This gave President Obama the opportunity to nominate the first lesbian Supreme Court nominee. She was approved by a 51 to 49 vote just before the 2012 election. With three very far left Justices replacing one conservative, one liberal, and one far left liberal, the balance of the Court shifted quite far to the left.
The 2012 elections were hard fought. President Obama decided to ask Vice President Biden to step aside and chose Hillary Clinton to be his Veep. His challenger, Mitt Romney, to shore up his conservative base, selected Michelle Bachman to be his running mate. When the Romney/Bachman ticket opened a double-digit lead in August, Obama felt forced to have Hillary on his ticket. In the end Obama/Clinton squeaked through with a narrow popular vote victory of 50.9% to 49.1% but with a more comfortable electoral vote of 298 to 237.
Polls showed the Republicans poised to take eight Senate seats and 43 House seats. However, electoral irregularities in St. Louis, in Chicago and Springfield Illinois, Florida, Oregon, Washington State, and in Pennsylvania brought about recounts. In every recount there were thousands of disputed votes that swung the results to the Democrats. Thus the Democrats were able to keep slim control of the House and only lost three Senate seats, giving them a 50 to 50 tie.
A week after the 2012 election the Department of Labor revealed that they had miscalculated the unemployment rate. Instead of the 9.7% they had reported, the rate was really 10.7%. By the end of 2013 the unemployment rate had climbed to 12.6%, though private economists said it would have been even higher but for the fact that so many workers had given up even trying to get a job.
On the health care front over 300 smaller insurance companies either went out of business or merged with the big five: Cigna, Blue Cross Anthem, Blue Shield, Aetna, and Humana. These five, plus the Kaiser system, covered more than 90% of Americans who still had private insurance.
In January 2013 China moved warships into the Straits of Taiwan demanding that the Island of Taiwan rejoin the mainland. Secretary of State John Kerry called for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council. China threatened to dump its entire holdings of Treasury Notes if the United States did not work out a formula for Taiwan to be given back to the mainland. After two months of tension, Secretary Kerry and President Obama declared a victory. China would continue to hold on to its Treasury Notes and a two-year process for uniting Taiwan and China was ratified by the Security Council. This was hailed in the New York Times and other major world newspapers as the vindication of President Obama’s Noble Peace Prize.
However, within a month of that news Iran went public with its first successful above ground nuclear test. Israel had reported two underground tests it had detected in late 2011 and early 2012, but these were dismissed by our CIA as over-reactions and were identified by the scientists at East Anglia University as earthquakes. Following the blast, the President called upon Iran to join the other nuclear powers, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, France, Britain, and the United States, as trustees for peace. A new organization, Nuclear Nations United for Total Security (NNUTS), held its first meeting at the White House. Susan Rice was named United States envoy to that organization and announced that the following year’s meeting would be held in Teheran.
Six months afterwards, July 4, 2013 saw a simultaneous attack on Israel from Hezbollah in the north and Hamas from the south and west. Israel repelled the attacks from Gaza and the West Bank but took major losses in the north. Within three days Iran warned the United States that if it sent help to Israel, Iran would not only sink ships in the straits of Hormuz, it would also attack US positions remaining in Iraq. Secretary Kerry called for a meeting of the United Nations, but China and Russia threatened to veto any resolutions other than the return of Israel to its 1967 borders and the immediate declaration of a Palestinian state. Iran, having been granted a seat on the Security Council after complex negotiations in 2012, stated that if the US did not recognize a Palestinian State with Hamas as the governing party, Israel would be vulnerable to a nuclear attack.
The United States, having prevented Israel from attacking Iran in 2010, tried to use its good will in the Moslem world to mediate the crisis. However, to its surprise, while the Arab states applauded Iran’s demands and praised the new Moslem diplomatic power, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and all the Gulf States were terrified of Iran’s nuclear capability and demanded that the US allow Israel to attack. Doing so, they said, would accomplish two goals: the destruction of Israel and the weakening of Iran simultaneously.
Fortunately for Israel, Vice President Clinton was able to persuade President Obama to send former President Clinton to Israel and Iran to smooth the conflict. In the end Israel declared a ceasefire, an agreement for a three-year transition to a Palestinian State was signed, and Israel reluctantly agreed to allow the Palestinians to have one-fourth of Jerusalem as their capital. Once again the New York Times and world newspapers praised President Obama for action meriting his Noble Peace Prize.
To be continued…
Looking Backward 2032-2010, part 2
By 2014 the price of oil had risen to $190 per barrel. Unleaded gasoline was $7.50 per gallon in most states, $9.25 in California. Sales of Chrysler cars declined and Chrysler had to be absorbed by General Motors, with huge government subsidies. Both Ford and Toyota were subjects of endless government investigations, all of which proved spurious in the end, but which cost each company hundreds of millions of dollars to defend, and also caused them bad publicity. By 2015 General Motors had again regained number one in US market share.
Unemployment continued to rise. Tax increases, some of which were the result of allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, others of which related to increases in Medicare taxes and hundreds of local, state, and federal “fees,” had caused the economy to slow even further. The National Debt, which had been around 30% of Gross Domestic Product in 2007 had risen to 160% of GDP. This was the result of a combination of increased spending mandates and decreased GDP as the so-called “Great Recession” continued. Economists debated whether the forces of inflation or deflation were stronger, but as of 2014 deflation continued to prevail.
Housing prices had recovered somewhat in 2011-2012, but took another severe dip in 2013-2014. In response Congress passed a law to prevent banks from foreclosing on homes unless the owner had missed more than 12 consecutive payments. Thus tens of thousands of homeowners made only one or two payments per year.
A problem that most Americans had not anticipated, but which several Think Tanks had studied as early as 2002, was a huge influx of refugees from Mexico. In 2010 several border towns had virtually been taken over by drug cartels. With the recession continuing, drug revenues were down and the cartels resorted to kidnapping and extortion as a means of maintaining their cash flow. In 2011 five thousand citizens of El Porvenir, a border town near Fort Hancock, Texas, marched across the border demanding political asylum. President Obama immediately saw this as an opportunity to create a new “Amnesty” program.
Michelle Obama made a documentary on the plight of children in the Mexican border towns, joined by the Hispanic Caucus in the House of Representatives. When a busload of children was attacked by the drug lords public sympathy in the United States moved decisively toward granting political refugee status to all who were fleeing drug related violence in Mexico. Soon the numbers swelled to the tens of thousands each month. By the end of 2012 over 100,000 Mexican citizens had entered Texas, Arizona, and California.
Seeing an opportunity to solidify their standing among Latino voters, the Democrats pushed through a measure granting those fleeing Mexico the same fast track to citizenship that had been granted decades earlier to Cubans, and to a lesser extent to Vietnamese refugees. While this did not affect the demographics of the 2012 election, it did set in motion a tidal wave that crested in 2020, adding 3 million additional voters from Mexico who had been “political refugees” and another 9 million who had been undocumented aliens who had come to the US for economic rather than political reasons in earlier years. This turned out to be decisive in a number of unexpected ways, as will be described later.
On the health care front, Medicare reimbursement cuts had been going on for the previous two years. More and more doctors were refusing to take Medicare patients. With the population of seniors over age 65 growing, and with fewer doctors accepting Medicare payments, a new crisis arose. There were millions of seniors with coverage but no doctor to accept their insurance. President Obama declared, “Rich doctors are joining rich insurers and rich Wall Street tycoons in hurting the little guy.” To remedy the situation, Congress passed a law that to keep their medical licenses, all physicians had to demonstrate that 30% of their practices consisted of Medicare patients.
Since the States and not the Federal Government licensed physicians, this became a jurisdictional battle in the Courts. By 2014 Justice Kennedy had also retired, and President Obama appointed the first Moslem to the Supreme Court. He was ratified by a vote of 49 – 49. One Senator was in the hospital on life support during the vote and Senator Lieberman recused himself, lest his vote inflame the Arab world. The Court now had a 6 to 3 liberal and left majority. It declared that consistent with the Preamble of the Constitution, which included the phrase, “provide for the general welfare,” they could over-rule the States and impose this requirement “for the general welfare and health of our citizens.”
This was not to be the end of the matter. Physician compensation from Medicare was lower than the costs to provide services, and private insurance reimbursements were not much better. Furthermore, so many procedures, such as MRI’s, PET scans, thallium treadmill tests had reimbursements cut or were simply not authorized any more. And so many surgical operations were denied to patients, such as hip replacements, many physicians adopted variations of the “Concierge Medicine” model. In this model physicians continued to offer care to everyone, including the 30% of required Medicare patients, but only those who paid an up-front yearly retainer, usually ranging from about $500 to $5000, would get rapid service.
A Concierge patient could get an appointment the same day or with one day’s notice. A non-concierge patient might have to wait a week or longer. A Concierge patient might be given their physician’s cell phone and could expect same-day reports on diagnostic tests. A non-concierge patient might get a call from a clerk or nurse at the end of the week. Gradually a two-tier system that was far worse than had ever existed in the United States was developing, and doing so much more rapidly than any of the HCR advocates of 2010 had anticipated.
By 2015 there was alarm in many quarters over the lack of any new drugs coming to market. The pharmaceutical industry’s last new series of drugs hit the market in 2014. What limited innovation that the pharmaceutical industry was producing came from Switzerland and France. The United States was no longer the center of medical innovation. Furthermore, in 2012 most of the medical instrument companies had either closed their research departments or had moved their headquarters out of the United States. For the first time in 100 years, medical treatment was more advanced in other countries than in the US.
Besides the Medicare issue the Medicaid population had mushroomed with the influx of mostly poor refugees from Mexico, many of whom brought illnesses such as tuberculosis that had not been seen for years in such quantities in the US. Drug resistant strains of tuberculosis became prevalent by 2014 but the closing of pharmaceutical research departments and the absence of profitable new drugs aggravated this. The few remaining research pharmaceutical companies in France and Switzerland had no incentive to develop new anti-tuberculosis medications, since stringent drug price controls had been passed in 2014 by the Administration after their health care reform of 2010 was $500 billion over budget.
Another crisis in health care was apparent within months of the passage of the health care reform act of 2010. The major companies began huge write-downs in anticipation of the tax changes and the increased costs the HCR bill mandated. Congress was furious about this, claiming that it was a conspiracy to cause unnecessary panic among the voters prior to the 2010 election. However, Congressman Henry Waxman was embarrassed on national television when the CEO’s and CFO’s of those companies read to him the sections of the Sarbanes-Oxley Bill that Waxman had supported, citing the very paragraphs in which Congress itself had required those precise write-offs. After the hearings virtually every large company followed the lead of AT&T and Caterpillar in announcing similar write-downs. This precipitated a minor crash on the stock market, as hundreds of companies anticipated lower profits because of these write-downs.
Compared to these problems, Concierge Medicine was consigned to the background. Nevertheless Congress would have passed a law to outlaw Concierge Medicine fees but for the fact that the 2016 elections resulted in Paul Ryan’s election, and swept in a Republican majority in the House that matched that of the Democrats in 2008, and gave them a 61 vote majority in the Senate. President Ryan vowed to reduce the deficit, tackle the entitlement program shortfall, and shrink government. The mainstream media feared that the Republicans would use their majority with the same force as the Democrats had in 2010, but this did not come to pass. First of all the Republicans had a greater inherent respect for procedure and precedent than the Democrats. This was to be expected as being within the nature of conservatism. Second, the MSM turned its barrels against the use of the very techniques they had praised when the Democrats had used them earlier. Third, the Supreme Court, which was unwilling to interfere with the Legislative process during the Obama years, was willing and eager to do so under the Ryan Presidency.
In the end the Republicans were able only to reduce the size of government marginally, to keep the deficit flat at 160% of GDP, finally getting it down to only 110% of GDP by their last year, thanks to a growing economy and not due to any significant reductions in government spending. Wringing out the excesses of government brought about a temporary increase in unemployment, especially from the public sector, and this resulted in major Congressional losses for the Republicans in the 2018 election.
more to be continued later….
Looking Backward 2032 – 2010 part 3 (I will stop at part 3 so as not to overtax the thread or overstep our host’s welcome:
Not all the focus of the country was on politics. The world of entertainment was also in flux. The Writer’s Strike in 2008 had begun what started as a slow trickle and ended as an avalanche completely transforming the entertainment industry. Reality shows increasingly replaced television drama and became more and more shocking. In 2013 a television personality who had earlier had her own colonoscopy televised on the Today show, invited cameras to her live televised mastectomy, with huge ratings. This opened the door to a popular television show televising circumcisions, angioplasties, colonoscopies, mastectomies, and other medical procedures. In 2015 there was a successful series on euthanizing household pets, mostly dogs and cats. Full frontal male nudity also was featured on several highly rated cable shows.
In sports, there were several television programs on athletic injuries, with graphic pictures of football players breaking legs, rupturing tendons, and suffering concussions. A famous television psychiatrist returned to his roots with a Celebrity Sex Addiction show that was very popular. It featured a hidden camera segment showing the course of treatment, including relapses, of his B-level former celebrities.
The increasingly vivid programming on reality TV made sports seem tame in comparison. Mixed Martial Arts had a “to the death” division that drew millions of viewers. The NFL experimented with a “no pads” league but the gruesomeness of the injuries was more than the football audience could bear, and it was cancelled in mid-season. To raise TV ratings there were suggestions that aquatic events in the Olympics be nude, but the loss of TV coverage in the Muslim world proved to make this innovation uneconomical.
On the social level, cigarettes were finally declared illegal the same month that marijuana was made legal and taxed. The revenues from marijuana however didn’t meet expectations, as so many users were growing their own supply. After six months, cigarettes were again legalized and very heavily taxed to raise revenue to pay for the ever-growing deficit in the health care program.
Under President Obama, legislation to implement so-called “Cap and Trade” that would have placed severe restrictions and limits on US industry as a way of reducing atmospheric CO2 had been narrowly defeated three times. The severe recession and the high rate of unemployment awakened Unions to the effect this legislation would have in reducing manufacturing jobs. As it turned out CO2 and Global Warming morphed into a serious concern about Global Cooling.
The sun spot cycle had been getting lower and lower since the early 1990’s and by 2012 the temperature curve clearly indicated that the earth was not only ceasing its warming but was actually getting cooler. In 2010 volcano activity in Iceland added to the cooling trend. In 2011 there were six more significant volcano eruptions in Iceland and in 2013 there was a major volcano in the straits between Java and Sumatra. The combination of these volcanoes spewed so much dust and debris into the atmosphere that 2014 and 2015 were years without summers in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
At first former Vice President Al Gore tried to claim that the new Global Cooling was really caused by Global Warming and called for immediate action to revive the Kyoto Agreement. However, when both China and India stated that they had no intention whatsoever of following any such agreement, it became clear that Gore’s proposal was going nowhere. Some of the former Global Warming coalition formed organizations promoting grave disaster scenarios of Global Cooling and a “New Ice Age.” The New York Times and the Washington Post promoted these groups but they never achieved the traction that the discredited Global Warming movement of the 1990’s and 2000’s had attained.
The lack of summers and the cooling effect of the combination of declining sunspots and volcanic dust produced a marked increase in the need for petroleum products. Heating oil became extremely expensive and petrochemicals for fertilizer also rose in price. The former was in response to the falling temperatures and the latter was precipitated by the crop failures that resulted from the shortened growing season. This hit third world countries the hardest, and there were reports of famine conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the United States was still in the midst of a huge anti-obesity campaign and the idea of a part of the world needing more to eat while the US was trying to learn how to eat less, was more cognitive dissonance than the main stream media could absorb. Therefore the African famine got hardly any coverage.
The oil producing countries, especially Venezuela and Norway and Saudi Arabia, profited greatly as a result of the Global Cooling. Iran still had not modernized its oil industry and therefore gleaned less benefit from rising oil prices. The cold summers of 2012 and 2013 did lead to a deepening of the recession. This too added to the difficulties President Ryan and the Republican Congress had during the 2016 – 2020 term in convincing the public that their austerity measures were the right course for the nation to take.
With the country still mired in recession and with unemployment still fluctuating between 9.5% and 12.5%, the election of 2020 was a gloomy undertaking. President Ryan was hailed in Conservative Think Tanks as doing the right thing but the general discontent of the public was enormous. America’s institutional procedures had for years pushed things toward the middle. We had never had the extreme fluctuations that were common in Europe and elsewhere. But this election and the ones to come were more and more extreme.
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida battled Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana in a fiercely fought series of primaries. In the end Senator Landrieu was nominated and she defeated President Ryan. The public saw her as the most moderate of the Democrats and also thought that she, as a woman, would better understand “the American household’s suffering.” With her came a large swing again toward the Democrats in Congress. The 2020 election did not produce a filibuster-proof Senate, but the filibuster had been virtually eliminated back in 2010. So the country looked forward in 2020 to real change.
The world was changing rapidly by 2020. China had absorbed Taiwan, but the US refused to accept the seven million Taiwanese who wanted to come to the United States, stating that they didn’t want to offend China. A few of those Taiwanese moved to Vancouver despite the rivalry with the Chinese who had emigrated from Hong Kong fifteen or more years earlier. Most were welcomed in Chile where they immediately contributed to the economic growth of that South American nation.
Hamas had led the Palestinian Republic for three years but by 2021 Islamic extremists supported by Iran had taken over that government. Violence in Jerusalem escalated and in 2022 the Al-Kutz Brotherhood had blown up the Western Wall. President Landrieu issued a statement condemning the “criminal element that conducted this act of vandalism,” but no action was taken by the United States. The Security Council passed a resolution condemning Israel for its provocative actions. While Vice President Andrew Cuomo had been visiting Israel two weeks before the bombing of the wall, Housing Minister Shlomo Solomon led a rally in favor of a united Jerusalem. Secretary of State Adam Schiff called Prime Minister Tzipi Livni to complain about this insult and Livni apologized and threatened to dismiss Minister Solomon, but the Shas party threatened to leave the coalition if she did so, and nothing further came of it. However, Abu Abdul Achmed, the titular Prime Minister of the Palestinian Republic, signaled that he would not interfere with the Al-Kutz Brotherhood when he removed the Palestinian Guard from the border between West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem. The bomb destruction of the Western Wall happened three days later.
The United States completed its full withdrawal from Iraq in 2021. In 2022 Iran moved to suppress the Kurdish people in their northern and eastern provinces. The Kurds unwisely rebelled, demanding that President Woodrow Wilson’s promise 100 years earlier to establish a Kurdish Nation be fulfilled. This gave Iran, Turkey, and Iraq an excuse to fight over the territory in which the main population of Kurds lived. After a brief period of open hostilities Iran annexed the former Iraqi Kurdish regions, except for a small area they ceded to Turkey to keep the Turks out of the war. As a consequence Iraq’s land mass was reduced by 25% and one of its major oil centers was lost to Iran. But the world breathed a sigh of relief that Iran had not used its nuclear weapons in this conflict.
Russia was also busy in this decade. Disputed elections in the Georgian Republic and in the Ukraine had resulted in parties advocating reunification with Russia. Although Sergey Petrovich was the nominal leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin was still the power behind the scenes. Putin and Hugo Chavez had earlier signed a mutual defense pact that gave Russia control of most of Venezuela’s oil. Global Cooling enabled Putin to use this leverage to influence the price of oil internationally. In so doing Putin was able to starve the Ukraine and Georgia of petroleum products. Thus their reunification with Russia was needed to restore their economies.
In Europe, Amsterdam’s Moslem Mayor, Mohammed Al-Axa, was elevated to Prime Minister when a coalition of leftist, green, and Islamic parties won control of the Parliament. Only in France itself was there sufficient national and cultural pride, and sufficient indifference to world opinion, to defend its identity. France outlawed the burka, outlawed covering of the face, and required all citizens to swear allegiance to French law. Riots in the Moslem areas were very destructive but eventually the French Gendarmerie was unyielding in putting down the rebellion. As a result, France became the only country in Western Europe that preserved its identity as a nation ruled by secular law only. The Germans eventually tried to follow France’s example but the enormous number of laborers from Turkey and elsewhere were essential to its economy and they compromised by allowing communities in which there were more than 30% Muslims to live under Sharia Law. The Scandinavian countries had long since adopted this solution. In 2022 Mayor Mohammed Bin Sultan of Oslo and Mayor Ibrahim Gamal of Stockholm were Muslim.
In England the Anglican Church had lost its status as the Church of England. Twenty-seven members of Parliament were Muslim and they forced a bill through that eliminated the Christian identity of England. It had been well known that Queen Elizabeth was opposed to this change but she had passed away in 2019 and Prince Charles was then King Charles. However, controversy over his silence on the matter was so great that popular opinion forced him to abdicate and his son became King William IV. However, William proved powerless to restore the now disestablished Anglican Church.
In the United States the economy was still in a stagnant decline, slowly getting worse each year. The price of oil was now $260 a barrel and retail gasoline prices were $9.75 per gallon for regular, $12.30 for premium in California. Social Security had gone six straight years paying out more than it took in and was projected to be completely insolvent by 2029. Medicare had been insolvent for two years by the time President Landrieu and Congress passed a complete Single Payer health system. Not only was the Federal Government responsible for providing all payments for health care. In addition, Concierge Medicine fees were made a felony. No citizen was permitted to pay for medical care outside the Single Payer system.
This draconian measure was initially very popular with the mainstream media and applauded by the public. However, soon its first unintended but anticipated consequence became evident. Thousands of physicians ceased practicing medicine in the United States. Those over age sixty simply retired. Those under age sixty who were in specialties that focused on procedures – surgeons, radiologists, and many oncologists – prevailed on patrons here at home to build clinics outside the United States to American standards. The most favored locations were in three Mexican cities across the border from towns in Texas, Arizona, and California. Cuba, now that the Castro’s had finally left the scene, was booming, thanks to the efforts of prosperous Cuban Americans from Florida. They too set up state of the art medical centers. Costa Rica became another favorite location, especially for cosmetic surgery, ophthalmology, and certain aspects of dermatology.
A thriving business in Gulf Stream Jets attracted many new investors, as patients who could afford it sought convenient access to these new clinics and surgery centers. But so-called “Medical Tourism” was not limited to locations near the United States. India, Israel, and Dubai became major destinations for Americans and others seeking the finest in medical care. India and Israel had long had excellent medical schools and high standards for their physicians. Dubai basically bought the services of Harvard Medical School, which set up a satellite medical school there for a rumored $90 billion dollars. Between the border town medical complexes, Cuba, Costa Rica, India, Israel, and Dubai, more than half of US trained physicians practiced medicine outside the territory of the United States.
This exodus of physicians, combined with the lack of new medical school construction, caused a tremendous doctor shortage. In the 1980’s state legislators had tried to limit medical expenditures by reducing specialty residencies, reasoning that specialists charged more than general practitioners. And because medical school tuition fell short by more than $50,000 (2010 dollars) per student per year of covering the cost of educating medical students, no state was willing to take on the expense of building more medical schools. For a long time the number of physicians graduating from US medical schools remained flat while the population grew larger and older and more filled with immigrants, many of whom were here illegally, who brought exotic diseases with them. The shortfall in doctors had been made up by a US imposed “brain drain” on other countries, mostly India, Israel, South Africa, and Korea. However, once physician compensation had been sharply reduced and governmental restrictions on medical practice had come into effect, fewer foreign physicians saw the United States as an economically attractive place to practice. Besides, there were now thriving centers in Mexico, Cuba, India, Israel, and Dubai that now practiced higher patient care standards than America.
Congress tried to outlaw the ability of American citizens to practice medicine outside the United States, but even the ultra-liberal Supreme Court refused to go that far, declaring the law unconstitutional. To remedy the situation and solve the crisis, Congress passed a law giving nurses with an RN the full privileges that had formerly been reserved for MD’s. State jurisdiction in such matters had been lost in the “30% Medicare patients or lose your license” case, though some Attorneys General tried unsuccessfully to argue that this was a matter for the States to decide. In any event, the doctor shortage was temporarily solved by the decree that RN’s were now the same as physicians.
For a while this worked, even lowering costs under the 2010 Health Care Reform Act. But the trial lawyers soon spoiled this solution with a flood of malpractice suits. Congress was in a bind, wanting to reduce the costs of medical care but not wanting to cross the Plaintiff’s Bar. The election of 2024 would turn out to be decisive here.
Few people expected Senator Henry Lopez of New Mexico to win the Democratic nomination over President Landrieu. The Yale educated Lopez was handsome, articulate, tall, and of course, bilingual. The huge influx of political refugees had been given a fast track to citizenship and the majority of the 9 to 12 million undocumented aliens who had come for economic reasons were now eligible to vote. In addition, the Hispanic baby boom of the 1990’s and 2000’s were now of voting age. Even the more conservative Cuban Americans rallied to Senator Lopez campaign. With the bitter taste of President Ryan’s austerity program still in their memory, voters shunned the Republicans and gave President Lopez a decisive victory.
The election of a Latino President was hailed as further proof of America’s emergence from its so-called racist past. But there were surprises in store for those whose initial enthusiasm was unbounded. President Lopez turned out to be a devout Catholic and the 16 million new Hispanic voters were social conservatives even though they were economic and national security liberals. While he and the Democrats sided with the trial lawyers on the issue of malpractice suits against the nurses who had the practice powers formerly reserved for physicians, in other areas he was much more socially conservative. Thus President Lopez did not oppose the effort to pass a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as an entity between one man and one woman. This became necessary when the famous “Harvard/Los Alamos” case reached the Supreme Court.
Over the years some States had passed laws allowing same-sex marriage while others had passed laws outlawing the same. The country was a hodge-podge of different rules. Advocates of same-sex marriage had thought to use the “full faith and credit” clause of the Constitution, contained in Article IV, Section 1 and the first paragraph of Section 2, to impose a requirement that marriages in each state be recognized by all states. Lower courts had given contradictory rulings so the matter was still not decided until the perfect case arose.
Two professors from Harvard, Kip Longman and Percy Smith, each a Noble Prize winner in Physics, had married in Massachusetts. They were invited to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to head an important research project essential to National security. New Mexico did not have a law recognizing same-sex marriage. When they arrived Longman and Smith sought to have their marriage recognized in New Mexico. They were the picture book couple: youthful middle aged men who were attractive and articulate, entirely monogamous and faithful to each other for nearly fifteen years, and obviously highly accomplished scientists, devoting their careers to a project of great importance to the country. This was indeed the perfect case to take to the Supreme Court.
And its advocates were absolutely correct. The Supreme Court, by a vote of 6 to 3, asserted that the “full faith and credit” clause did apply to marriage. They ruled that marriage is a contractual arrangement and that the Constitution requires all states to recognize contracts that are legally valid in any state. As long as same-sex marriage was legal in any state it had to be recognized in every state.
Those opposed to same-sex marriage were extremely concerned. Same-sex marriage could only be undone if it were to become unconstitutional. And only a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman would accomplish that. Besides, there was another brewing factor that few had thought of.
The Islamic population of the United States had been growing steadily. Although Islamic organizations had exaggerated their numbers, reasonable estimates put the Moslem population of the US at about 2 million in 2000. It had grown to 3 million by 2010. But because of all the turmoil in the Middle East after Iran acquired nuclear capability, a large influx from Iran, Pakistan, and the Arab world swelled those numbers to 7 million by 2020. That, plus the high birthrate in Moslem families, put the Islamic population at 10.5 million by 2025. (As a side comparison, the Jewish population of the US had declined to less than 5 million in 2020 and an estimated 4.5 million by 2025, and continuing to decline.)
Modeling after the successes of Jews in influencing politics, the Islamic population concentrated itself in a dozen communities. Orange County California, Southern Florida, New Jersey, and Michigan were the main centers of Islamic population by 2020. Seeking campaign contributions from this key electoral group was essential for any Presidential candidate. The “refugee” population from the Arab world was very wealthy and used its financial influence with great skill. And the electoral votes of those four states – Michigan especially, but also New Jersey, Florida, and even California, were critical in every election. This influence affected US policy toward Israel, of course, but also affected social issues here at home.
Many Islamic immigrants had multiple wives. The ability to maintain those relationships was a topic of great debate. The Utah territory had to abandon multiple marriages in order to be admitted into the Union, but that was more than a century ago, and times had definitely changed. The state of Michigan passed a law allowing Muslims who were legally married prior to entering the United States to remain married to their multiple partners. “We cannot break up families just because of our cultural preferences. Respect for multiculturalism demands that we honor the family love and relationships our new citizens bring with them,” was the ruling of the Michigan Supreme Court.
perhaps the remainder of this will appear later on…..
Wretchard says: If any proof were needed of the complete inadequacy of their mental models the ill-reposed confidence in their “summer of recovery” is it. It’s like getting a sack-o-s**t and dumping it on your own head.
Wait till you see the proposed new U.S. currency; click on over to American Digest for an illustrated preview of the ObamaBuck-U:
“The depressing thing here is that the braindead firm of Dowling Duncan actually thinks this adds value.
‘Why these designs? We wanted a concept behind the imagery so that the image directly relates to the value of each note. We also wanted the notes to be educational, not only for those living in America but visitors as well. Each note uses a black and white image depicting a particular aspect of American history and culture. They are then overprinted with informational graphics or a pattern relating to that particular image.’ . . . .
The firm’s proposed designs and their rationale:
‘$1 – The first African American president
$5 – The five biggest native American tribes
$10 – The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution
$20 – 20th Century America
$50 – The 50 States of America
$100 – The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt. During this time he led the congress to pass more important legislations [sic] than most presidents pass in their entire term. This helped fight the economic crises at the time of the great depression. Ever since, every new president has been judged on how well they have done during the first 100 days of their term.’”
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/enemies_foreign_domestic/the_obamabucku_a_new_bill.php
wretchard @ 27: Sure, Obama oversold the “summer of recovery”, but the reasons for this are multiple. Any politician would have done the same, but this one is clueless in ways and to degrees unprecedented in American history. His experts probably told him it was a lame claim, but his experts have been wrong – and also liars. I don’t know what Geithner has in his heart or between his ears, he’s a second rater, but not a fool, and he must know the depth of the horror that was manifest in 2008 and is with us still, chained for the moment but far from dead. The US economy, and perhaps western capitalism as we have known it since Adam Smith, is whistling past the graveyard still. If it should by chance recover this summer, even in small part, don’t you want to have called it? And remember, Obambus, as a liberal, believes things can get better, perhaps must get better such that he CANNOT do any real damage, all he has to do is stay on the horse … to mix metaphors.
What the modern liberal does not seem to realize is the incredible effort it takes just to maintain the modern world, keep the potholes fixed, the electricity generating, the garbage picked up, … the military so far ahead of the rest of the world that we feel existentially safe … the liberal thinks only that it is the job of the progressive (eg the community organizer) to spread the wealth, which is after all God’s bounty on the Earth, or at least on the US of A.
PA Cat @ 36: $1, $5, … $100.
How about the $700,000,000,000 bill with Hank Paulson’s picture on the front, for discovering this new transcendental number and establishing it as the unit of measure for the Obamanation. On the back we have an engraving of Freddie doing Fannie, with the motto woven around them, “Oh my darling, you have my full faith and credit, so give me 25 basis points of your love!”
Of Faith, Hope, and “internal occupation” of his country”.
Wretchard 27:
” What else could he do but oversell the future?”
““internal occupation” of his country”.
Is that the O’wave Yuri Andrukhovych is describing?
“Once upon a time there was a country that wasn’t so bad at all, a country brimming with hope and knocking on Europe’s door. Where did it go?”
“The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.”
Matthew Arnold
…-
“Back to the Stalinist future”
“The clocks run backwards in the Ukraine: hardly six months have elapsed since the last elections and nearly nothing remains of the “Democratic Awakening” that rocked the nation in 2004. Writer Yuri Andrukhovych depicts the “internal occupation” of his country and implores Europe to watch closely what’s happening there.”
http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/322581-back-stalinist-future
The most striking thing to me is the lack of imagination that is being shown by almost everyone. Even many of the clear thinkers who post here say things that can’t possibly be true. For instance, during the HC debacle I saw many here posting that once passed we would never be able to rescind, as entitlements are never abolished, only expanded. Then expound on how none of this is sustainable. It’s one or the other. If something isn’t sustainable, it won’t be sustained.
Then I see dire reports in the media that SS is running out of money, and the “trust fund” will be broke much earlier than anticipated. People are projecting what the SS burden will do to us by, say 2040, when in fact the issue will be addressed well before then. The “trust fund” is a figment of everyones’ imagination, and speculation about it’s solvency is ridiculous. SS will or will not be sustained based on the ability to fund it out of current general revenues. The “trust fund” doesn’t exist, except as a bookeeping entry, and is irrelevent to the discussion.
Still, much of the discussion hinges on the TF, and people are actually taken seriously when they reference it. In a sane world anyone who utters SS and TF in the same breath would instantly be dismissed as an idiot, but we’re not there yet. I think we will be, and pretty quickly. No one knows what things will be like in 2040, but my guess is that if we’re still here SS will not be an issue
that is discussed, except maybe to point to it as a failed, obsolete program that illustrates what we shouldn’t do.
I love reading opinion pieces in the “elite” media. It’s fascinating to see people of supposedly superior intelligence analyzing the situation using outmoded models, and trying to reassure themselves that their outlook will prevail. I just read David Broders piece, for instance, on how McCain should now ride in and “save” the GOP from itself, and all I could do was laugh. The media is full of these clueless individuals, and they provide some needed comic relief in an otherwise dire situation.
Just a couple of examples of the fog we’re in today as we attempt to make sense of this. There’s so many others, that it would be a lot easier to just list those where the official, approved discussion had some basis in reality. That would be a short list indeed.
I’ve thought for a while that comparison to the summer of 1914 is apt. Sure, the issues are different, and 2010 is light years away from 1914. The similarity is that lack of imagination. If any of the “statesmen” who went to war in 1914 could have forseen the result, they would have run screaming from the very idea of armed conflict. The world of English Aristocrats and European Monarchs was abolished by the Aristocrats and Monarchs. Suicide by stupidity. Our “elite” are repeating the same process. They are sustained only by the very foundations that they are rapidly destroying, and the pace is picking up.
People are saying that we’re in for a lost decade, citing Japan as a reference. We don’t have a decade, and the resulting instability will affect the entire world, because the US will be greatly affected. There is, in the (near) future, some event that will tip us over, but no one can tell what it will be. Future historians will marvel at our inability to see what was before our faces, and write many best sellers about the period. It’ll all be painfully obvious by then. That’s assuming that we don’t nuke our way into oblivion.
All that sounds pessimistic, I know, but I’m actually cautiously optimistic about our long term prospects. I don’t think Americans, as a rule, pay a lot of attention to politics unless they’re forced to. They are now, and I trust their basic instincts, even as I doubt that they, in general, have much knowledge of the facts. In normal times there would be an occasional groundswell of popular
political activity, followed by a return to apathy when the problems that produced it were thought to be addressed, or at least the main culprits ousted. Then there’s the strain of thought that there’s nothing we can do anyway, all politicians are alike, so why bother. That’s going to go away as people are forced to pay attention, and make difficult choices. They’re going to be forced to bother, and I hope and believe that many of the choices they will make will be wise, or at least wiser than the ones our “betters” have made over the years.
In 2007 we had a deficit of congressional spending at 161 billion dollars. By 2009, when Bush left office, after a year and a half of democrat controlled congress, it was up 500 billion. Now would any fence sitters like to explain why “both parties are the same” and further, why there is any sound reasoning behind sitting the next election out?
And please, do not give democrats in executive office any ideas. It’s like feeding the trolls, only much much worse.
Batman – When one has several children and another is expected there is only one thing known for certain… The next one will be totally different than its siblings. Likewise with the predictions of the future.
Your prognostications are most interesting however. Should you need and not be able to get more space contact me and I’ll give you a space on my web site. Maybe Wretchard can help with this if he thinks your comments take up too much space.
Batman: put covers on it, it’s a book. I’d buy it although I’d need meds afterward. What a prospect. …Your take on human motivation (price controls causing a collapse of supply in medical innovation and physician services) is spot on. Innovative pharma R&D is going that way, although 2014 may not be a bright line beyond which everything stops. It takes time for the flywheel to spin down. That sense of lost momentum (and new, different forces adding momentum in new, different directions) is quite apparent in your words.
W: once again I wish I could disagree with your perspective. I wasn’t around in 1914 or 1939 but from what I’ve read, the mood was very like today. Human nature, I guess, to pretend it isn’t happening, to let somebody else deal with it, to bargain for just a little more time in the light.
Stupidity can only be ignored and tolerated up to a certain point. Once it achieves critical mass everything tends to fall apart rather rapidly. We are nearly there. The current system is unsustainable. It will collapse. The main question is how gracefully will it collapse. Will it consist of a mild seizure or will it be a major stroke?
I am not optimistic. The sources of the political class’ power are the very things that are causing the system to collapse. If the micro-managerial welfare state is dismantled it will be the equivalent of having their Ring of Power being thrown into the Cracks of Doom. I do not think that they will go gently into the twilight of history without a fight.
It is sad, pathetic and scary, but it is a sign of our times that the most lucrative financial investment one can make is that of making a contribution to someone’s election campaign.
@ Wretchard (15) who said “Even the mechanically interesting Prius was intentionally wrapped in a hideous design. Why? Clarkson believes it was because Toyota understood “environmentalists” all too well. They didn’t want to save the world. They wanted to announce their own moral superiority to the universe. And the best way to do that was to run around in something that shouted “I care! I care!” Form versus function? No. Vanity versus everything.”
An episode of South Park captured this sentiment perfectly. It was entitled “Smug Alert.”
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/155193
Oswald Chambers
Daily Reflections with Oswald Chambers [August 27, 2010]
Living Your Theology
“Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you . . .”
—John 12:35
Beware of not acting upon what you see in your moments on the mountaintop with God. If you do not obey the light, it will turn into darkness. “If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” ( Matthew 6:23 ). The moment you forsake the matter of sanctification or neglect anything else on which God has given you His light, your spiritual life begins to disintegrate within you. Continually bring the truth out into your real life, working it out into every area, or else even the light that you possess will itself prove to be a curse.
Josh @ 37 “What the modern liberal does not seem to realize is the incredible effort it takes just to maintain the modern world”
Chesterton said somewhere that liberals have the completely wrong idea that stasis is the natural state of the world, and that change can only happen through enormous effort by valiant visionaries like themselves. In fact the opposite is true. Conservatism requires tremendous hard work, and never truly succeeds. To try to salvage something from the inevitable erosion of Nature is very difficult.
I think the reason liberals think this way is because their idea of the natural world is basically lifeless and mechanical. It’s “the culture of death” projected onto the entire world. When they want an example of the world without their interfering ministrations, they think of something like a rock. “Look at that thing!” they say. “It just sits there. It never changes. It looked exactly the same a year ago, and it will look the same next year, unless we DO something.” So they set about pushing the rock over, or blowing it up, or whittling it down into little pieces, and think they’ve struck a blow for Progress. In fact, they’re not even right about the unchangeability of the rock, but their prescriptions become ludicrous when applied to the living world.
Anyone with a tiny patch of lawn or garden knows that just doing nothing results in rapid transformation of the area – weeds and trees plant themselves, insects and animals start chewing, diseases produce withering. Trying to keep the patch of land from transforming in this way, to keep it looking as clean is it did the day I turned over the soil with a rototiller or cut the grass with a lawnmower – CONSERVING it in one state – requires constant labour and attention. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible; the forces against me are just too strong. But I do my best, and by the end of the year I still have something that looks tolerably like a garden.
In the same way, trying to conserve artifacts from the past, be they art works, buildings or institutions, requires constant activity. Liberals bust up these things and think they’re shaking off the dull weight of stasis and striking a blow for independence and originality; in fact they’re just riding along on top of the wave of natural destruction that claims everything if not opposed.
Looking Backward 2032 -2010 part 4
(Yes, I know that no one can truly predict the future. OTOH, thinking through these scenarios may give pause to progressives who are breaking the speed limit on the way to breaking America.)
However, now that the US Supreme Court had applied the “full faith and credit” clause to same-sex marriage, would it now also apply to multiple partner marriage? This is the tipping point for the Latino population to begin a serious drive to amend the Constitution to define marriage as between ONE man and ONE woman.
The politics of this Constitutional Amendment turned out to be one of the strangest collections of strange bedfellows seen in memory. Evangelical Christians of course favored it by margins approaching 90%. Catholics also favored it, but by smaller margins of around 60%. The ever-increasing Moslem population opposed it by more than 80%, but it was the Jewish population that divided dramatically. The Reform Movement opposed the measure. By 2025 over 40% of Reform clergy – Rabbis and Cantors – were gay or lesbian, and they regarded the amendment as an abridgement of their civil rights and of equality. Most secular and unaffiliated were divided 50/50 – they wanted to preserve same-sex marriage but they feared the population explosion if Islamic men could have up to four wives. The Orthodox were also divided. The various Hassidic movements opposed the amendment, seeing it as a threat on behalf of the state to interfere with religious doctrine. Even though they opposed Islam they feared that once the government started to intrude into customs of any religion, Judaism would be next. The non-Hassidic Orthodox took the opposite position declaring that their fear of Islam was greater than their fear of the American government. Of course most of the educated elite, all of the entertainment industry, and the liberal Protestant Churches opposed the amendment. African-American voters, to the chagrin of the Democrats, favored the amendment by 65%. Polls indicated that the Latino voters held the balance by which the amendment would pass or fail.
To pass a Constitutional amendment requires approval of 75% of the States. Fierce campaigning began everywhere. Some states, such as New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington, and California refused to bring the proposed amendment to a vote. However, by 2028 the following states did hold referenda on the amendment. It was approved by the following states prior to the 2028 Presidential election.
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Twenty-five states had ratified the amendment.
Michigan, New Jersey, and New York formally rejected the amendment, as did Oregon, Washington, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Twelve states thus voted “no” on this amendment.
Thirty-eight states had to vote yes to pass the amendment, but Florida, Colorado, Nevada, California, and Virginia took every possible measure to avoid a vote, as polls in their states were extremely close and they didn’t want to take a chance. Alaska, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, and others didn’t want to be the state that tipped the balance either way. So the matter remained unresolved by the 2028 election.
Meanwhile, the American economy went through several wild gyrations. At first the influx of money from Arab immigration and inexpensive labor from the Mexican immigration gave the economy a boost. Stocks rose to a Dow of 18,770 briefly in 2026. However, after the crash of the Euro in 2019 and the establishment of a new world currency in 2021, the dollar had lost its attractiveness to foreign investors and sovereign wealth funds.
The Chinese government began a slow divestment in US Treasury notes, putting great pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. The Fed did precisely that in 2025, precipitating a wave of bankruptcies and housing defaults. With pressure from Congress and threats from President Lopez, the Fed lowered rates in early 2026, helping fuel a stock market high. However, by 2027 the world was again plunged into a deep recession. China had finished the bulk of its building projects by 2025 and was no longer buying great quantities of raw materials. This caused a plunge in the commodities markets, hurting third world countries hardest. The Fed pumped more stimulus dollars into the economy but all that did was to lower the value of the dollar. Since the “Globie” as the new world currency was nicknamed, was the reserve vehicle, adding more dollars merely contributed to inflation.
It was therefore in 2028, just before the election, that we can mark the breakthrough of the inflationary forces that had been brewing since 2009. Scholars and economists have continued to debate whether the Great Inflation started in 1913 or in 1933 or in 1964 or in 2009. By 2028 it was clear in retrospect that a tipping point had been reached. Unfortunately no one knew it at the time, and the 2028 elections proceeded as though the economy was again in one of its regular fluctuations. President Lopez was reelected, but the fight over the Constitutional Amendment had taken a toll, and he won by a smaller margin than the first time. Little did we know that he had inadvertently been named Captain of the Titanic.
The first hint of out of control inflation came when the Gulf States determined that they would require 25% of the payment for their oil in gold. In 2029 this seemed a reasonable request, given the newness of the Globie and the world’s unfamiliarity with its value. The Euro had collapsed some years earlier and each country in the Euro zone had returned to its own national currency. With each downward leg of the recession nations took whatever measures they thought necessary to keep their economies afloat. On the European continent only Germany retained discipline over their fiscal house. Greece, Italy, and Spain had become like third world countries in terms of the Drachma, the Lira, and the Peseta. The Pound Sterling had plummeted, as had the Irish Pound. The Scandinavian currencies were more stable, mostly due to the Norwegian oil reserves, but the rest of Western Europe, save France, was on the verge of financial collapse. The Eastern European countries that aligned with the US and with Germany, including Poland, Hungary, Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, were more stable. Those that aligned with the expanded Russian Federation, including all of the former Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Latvia, and Lithuania, were tied to the Russian economy and did better as long at first, but their welfare depended entirely on Russian oil and gas.
The countries of South America, with the exception of Costa Rica and Chile had all experienced heavy inflation by 2029. The Asian countries, especially China, had also. Japan was still mired in its now nearly thirty-year long stagnation. China had long ago surpassed both Japan and India in Gross Domestic Product but India remained relatively prosperous in the 2020’s thanks to its innovation in computer science and its thriving medical tourism business. But by 2029 India too was succumbing to inflation.
In the United States the dollar tumbled rapidly. The yearly deficits had by now grown to over 200% of GDP. Social Security was only a year or two from insolvency and the National Health Service had long since supplanted Medicare. The total national debt had climbed to $67 Trillion dollars, around five times the 2010 total of $12.3 Trillion. As prices rose, gasoline broke through $20 per gallon. Bread cost $17 per loaf; milk cost $19.50 per quart; an average man’s suit cost $6000 and a cup of coffee at the local 7-11 was $18. A small car cost $95,000 and a 1800 square foot condominium in Santa Monica, California ran between $4.5 and $5.5 million. The minimum wage was $35 per hour. And the price of gold was $7500 per ounce, if you had any. The government had recalled gold in 2022, making private ownership of gold or silver illegal. And learning from the confiscation of the 1930’s, Congress this time prohibited citizens who did not have a special numismatist’s license from having collections that included gold or silver coins. Despite this there remained a vibrant black market in gold coins of every denomination as well as 90% silver coins, mostly dimes and silver dollars, from the pre-1964 era.
The penny had been eliminated in 2020 and the nickel in 2022. A new $500 and $1000 bill with the faces of President Kennedy and President Clinton, respectively, were introduced in 2025. In 2030 a $5000 bill was authorized, this time with the portrait of President Obama. Plans were afoot to create a $10,000 bill featuring Rosa Parks, as a coalition of women and African Americans complained that no females were on paper currency.
No one knew what to do about this great inflation. Economists reassured the public that we were not in a hyperinflation – that would have meant that the currency was losing more than 10% of its value per month. But we were fast approaching that very threshold. Sixteen states, including California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Michigan, had declared bankruptcy. This enabled them to void contracts with government unions and to be relieved from their unfunded pension obligations. But it still didn’t solve the problem.
The Health Care Reform had ended up costing more than six times what the Congressional Budget Office had predicted in 2010. Health costs and Social Security were now just over 60% of GDP. The military had already been cut to the bone and was at the lowest level in US history. We had withdrawn troops from all overseas bases, including Germany, Okinawa, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, and all other locations. This had been hailed by the New York Times, now available only in its online version, as a triumph of anti-imperialism.
However, in the world wide inflationary depression that tightened its grip everywhere, aggressive nations saw an opportunity to take advantage of the vulnerability and chaos that prevailed. First North Korea attacked South Korea. With no US troops to protect them, the South Koreans sustained extremely heavy damage when the North exploded a nuclear bomb in Seoul. Eventually the South Korean army was able to repel the North Koreans, but the economies of both nations were ruined.
At this same time Iran invaded Iraq and annexed the eastern half of that country as well as the southern section near Basra. Seeing this opportunity, the Russian Federation marched into Bulgaria, Rumania, and the former Yugoslavia with little or no resistance. An initial effort to retake the Baltic States was rethought, as Estonia’s strong economy and close relationship with Germany dissuaded the Russians. China threatened Japan but the Japanese, having rearmed and acquired their own nuclear weapons some eight years earlier, persuaded the Chinese to back off. However, China did gain favorable trade relations with Japan in the aftermath.
Australia and New Zealand were mostly left out of the conflict, but India and Pakistan did have a brief nuclear skirmish in 2031 in which India regained control of about one-third of the territory of Pakistan. India declared that in this new world they would assert their might to destroy their Islamic neighbor if it were necessary to secure their safety. The cultural elite in Europe and the United States decried what they called “Hindu racism” against Islam, but India ignored the criticism.
South America was rife with economic and political chaos. Venezuela, with the help of the Russians, had dominated Bolivia and had established close ties in Paraguay and Uruguay. The strong influence of Hezbulla and Hamas in both of those countries had grown silently in the shadows and cemented anti-Israel and anti-US sentiment throughout the Atlantic side of the continent. Argentina joined with Venezuela in a “South American Common Market” that Brazil eventually joined as well. Only Chile and Columbia remained reasonably free and reasonably prosperous. The millions of Taiwanese who had immigrated in the late teens and early 2020’s enriched the Chilean economy. Columbia had seen its entire economy collapse in 2022 when the United States followed the earlier legalization of marijuana with the legalization of cocaine and heroin. However, thanks to their courageous President Jose Decalle, they turned their resources to light industry, food crops, and became a low tax manufacturing center for the pharmaceuticals that were no longer produced in the United States. Only these two countries, bordering on the Pacific Ocean, avoided the multiple curses of civil war, dictatorship, and hyperinflation in South America.
Africa had always been the “Dark Continent” out of the mainstream of history. But the conditions of depression from the drop in commodity prices, plus the inflation of world currencies and the renewed importance of gold and diamonds, brought its own set of problems. The Muslim centers of Africa – Nigeria, Somalia, Chad, Sudan, together with the Islamic states in the horn of Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula, were emboldened to conquest and to the spread of Islam throughout the continent. An African had been elected Pope after the death of Benedict XVI in 2019. Pope Clement XV was from the Ivory Coast and served from 2019 to 2027, and died from an epidural hematoma following an accident in which his car was hit by a runaway truck on a trip to South Africa. It was suspected that this was an act of terrorism by Islamists but it was never proven. Pope Leo XIV from Kenya, aptly named because of his physical stature – 6 feet 3 inches tall, 245 lbs, with a thick full head of hair – and because of his great courage, followed him.
Pope Leo XIV tried to rally all Christians, especially Roman Catholics, to see the threat of Islam in Africa and elsewhere. At the time of his ascension to the Papacy, the population of the planet was estimated to be 7 billion. Global Cooling and famine had slowed the population growth rate and a moderately severe pandemic of influenza had resulted in over 250,000,000 deaths. The numbers were high because there were no pharmaceutical companies willing to make vaccine unless they were indemnified against lawsuits. Since the US had lost all of the “Big Pharma” companies more than a decade earlier, and since Switzerland and France were the only remaining centers of new drug development, there was little sentiment in the rest of the world, least of all in the United States, to indemnify Swiss and French industry. Thus new vaccines never came to market.
The 2030 world census did confirm the 7 billion figure of which 2.6 billion were said to be Moslem and 1.8 billion said to be Christian, together with 1.3 billion Hindus and one billion Buddhists. (Incidentally, the world Jewish population in 2029 was 14 million and thus still had not matched the 17 million number they had in 1939.) The main Protestant movements did not want to get involved in this matter. The Eastern Orthodox Churches likewise had not overcome their centuries old suspicion of the Roman Catholic Church. Evangelical Christians rallied to the cause but were branded as intolerant racists and chauvinistic anti-multiculturalists by the intellectuals of America and Europe.
In the end the Christian population of Africa was reduced by nearly half – some by slaughter, some by forced conversion, some by starvation, some by influenza. But because the conflict was seen by most in the West as a black on black event, little heed was paid to it until long after it ended. In the years that followed there were dozens of books written by those same intellectuals about how the West had failed to defend humanity. Ironically, those books hardly sold any copies.
It was in Western Europe that Islamic headway was most dramatic. The Netherlands had become an Islamic haven several years earlier. Now the entire Scandinavian area had reached the critical mass of 30+% Muslim population. England reached that number the year before and had long since disenfranchised what used to be known as The Church of England. France still had pride in their culture and had expelled all Moslem immigrants who still adhered to the use of the Burka, the veil, or Sharia. Germany had made a practical bargain with its Islamic population: you may work here so long as you remain peaceful; we will not allow you to vote but you may partake of our social welfare system. In Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, traditional Catholic ways remained but all four countries felt increasingly threatened.
In the US the Islamic population had passed 11 million by 2030, and the entire population of the country was 370,000,000. The African American percentage had fallen to 7% and the Hispanic percentage had risen to 23.5% of the nation. Hispanic mayors were elected in every major American city and Latinos dominated City Councils and School Boards. By 2030 the Jewish population had declined to 3.7 million, or 1% of the total US population. Only the fervor of the Evangelical Christians preserved a semblance of pro-Israel sentiment in Congress.
As the 2032 elections approached America was in decline. Nurses performed as physicians; no new pharmaceutical products had been licensed for eighteen years, except those few from Switzerland and France. The medical device industry was located in China, with a few contributions coming from Germany. Life expectancy had begun to decline. Patients waited for weeks to get diagnostic tests. Care for citizens over age 80 was difficult to obtain. Physician assisted suicide had been authorized in 40 states, and many medical ethics professionals saw it used more as cost saving than a way of reducing the suffering of individuals in intractable pain. Only the rich could get first class care by leaving US territory and making their way to off shore clinics that were run on what used to be American standards.
The American military had been reduced to the lowest level in its history. When countries appealed to the US for help in repelling invaders or for humanitarian aid after earthquakes, tsunamis, or plague, America no longer had the resources. Israel was sustained by its technical innovations in computers, communications, biotech, agricultural processes, and medical tourism – and by the support not of American Jews but of Evangelical Christians who still continued to travel to Israel in times of conflict as well as times of peace.
The world economy was in the grip of the worst combination of depression and inflation seen since Weimar Germany in the late 1920’s. China was the only viable economic engine but even they were paralyzed. Philosophers and historians began to write articles about the start of a new “Dark Ages.” Islam was growing and the West was in retreat. Faith in Democracy was declining and no one trusted that the 2032 election would be free of fraud.
“If the U.S. leaves a void here, the secondary powers in the region—Israel, Turkey, and Iran—will begin tussling with one another for dominance.”
And this will not only be true internationally but domestically as well. People are not going to starve to death in the freezing dark because DC tells them they must.
Well over a decade ago I was in a meeting in which we in the field were seeking guidance on some key policy matters from DC. The representative from the Pentagon gave us little hope. There were so many divergent opinions, so many players, the process so slow, that DC was all but paralyzed; eventually if we got anything in the way of a written policy it would say nothing useful.
At that point I stood up and said we did not have to take that crap. We had the expertise to develop the right policy and procedures and more important, we had the power to implement it because we were down at the sharp end of the bayonet. I said we should define the policy and present it as a fait accompli to DC. And that is just what happened. In the end, DC did what we told them to do.
The current track will not lead to the country being paralyzed with indecision but rather DC generally becoming regarded as the village idiot making pronouncements. The “Control the States first” approach advocated by LIII will happen because of DC rather than in spite of it.
The groups that depend entirely on political power, the big unions, race industry, environmentalists, etc. will be the big losers. They may be able to get the orders issued but no one will pay attention to them.
The future belongs to those who show up for it. But the power belongs to those who say “We are not going to take this crap.”
This whole mess is the result of the Commies wanting to establish their power in a more permanent manner. The mortgage mess is a by-product of using tax dollars to buy votes, the repeated failures to control illegal immigration is an attempt to bend the demographic curve. Obamacare is a bribe to the present to be paid for by our children (those of us who HAVE children). The objective is to destroy capitalism, draw all the strands of power and control together into the hands of a “benign elite” and rule as a new aristocracy. They don’t give a tinker’s damn about how miserable life is for us peons, just that they are in charge and “doing well”. And remember, it is for the children.
All of lefty political thought ends up in the same place; a bunch of shrill, hectoring do-gooders trying to tell the productive masses what to do, what is good for them, how to do it and to shut up and like it. As it is the nature of the Ruling Class to look after the welfare of their (few) progeny they will truly evolve into an Aristocracy. They may be sly enough to trade off positions to maintain the appearance of representative government but it will indeed be a closed system. A close look at “political families” in America shows this process to be well underway already (can anybody say Kennedy?).
As for me I am more enamoured of Emiliano Zapata’s saying, “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!” than I am of the idea of shrivelling away under an endless tax burden.
Buy more ammo.
And if you read the article about hyperflation linked to the other day you might want to stock up on some commodities as well ( but you will still need the ammo to keep the grasshoppers at bay).
An example of what is wrong. According to the Politico today, the Repubs plan a slew of witch hunt investigations into the Obama admin. after Nov. So there goes any chance they had to do the right thing and strip down/out the communist legislation that has been passed and start to reverse government growth.
They will never learn. It isn’t about playing the game, it IS about governing. All of them need to go along with a complete replacement of Repubs. national leadership with constitutional conservatives. DAMN THEM ALL.
Thre’s a video on the sidebar at American Digest titled “Moonbat Professors” that perfectly exemplifies how and why the world has taken such a wrong turn.
Vanity, narcissism, egoism, whatever you want to call it, has replaced reason and natural law as the guiding principle of human interaction. When every man is a god then no other man is sacred. People as incoherent and beyond understanding as Professor Donna Haraway are making policy with not the slightest concern of the impact point of their legislative bullets on the body politic.
I recognize that it’s not fair to Donna Haraway to judge her based on a few minutes of video, but I hear and read that same kind of disconnected nonsense from people who get awarded for it all too often to not use it as an example. This is truly the Age of Idiocy.
A Brief Review From the American Thinker
October 26, 2008
Why the Mortgage Crisis Happened
51. docbill; “DAMN THEM ALL”
I concur, aside from defending the homeland (a job done poorly and at great expense due to political nonsense) the Federal Government has little to point to over the last decade or so that counts as a success. The devolution of power to the states and smaller units of government is the pathway to revival/survival.
This goes back to Pap Ray’s local activism and others insistence on getting involved in the local political parties; if we can choose who gets put on the ballot we may be able to ensure that we can avoid the “hold your nose and vote” scenarios that we have been faced with for the last decade or three.
At the very minimum moving the center of power to the state level will physically put the pols much closer to the people and make it more difficult for the lobbyists to press flesh and pass cash.
If the Repubs blow it and the next two years are pissed away on political infighting the nation may well breakup due to centripidal forces. They need to at least show a good-faith effort at responsible governing to have any credibility going into 2012.
An election marred by questions of ballot-box stuffing will be seen as illegitimate by certain (red state) portions of the population and the tension between the Feds and States is unlikely to lessen in the near future as fiscal problems continue, this may well be sufficient to overcome the glue of Federalism and send the pieces flying apart.
This would be an unhappy scenario at best. It will be truly horrific from an international viewpoint, weakness brought about by internal turmoil would encourage even more despotic adventurism than we see now. A collapse of the USA into Redland and East and West Welfaristans would take several years to sort out and would probably lead to a far less internationally active set of politicans/nations.
In the long run, and particularly if the break-up can be accomplished without internal combat, it would probably be a good thing. The greatest part part of the nation can very well get by without West Coast wackos and Northeast Ivy-League Liberals. The real question would be; can they get by without the center? Really, there is far more need of Iowa’s cornfields than there is for latte-drinking performance artists. Let each go their own way and see who prospers and who fails. Heck, the Bluelanders hate us neanderthal Midwesterners anyways, you would think they would happy to see us go.
The Federal Government is facing more than a fiscal crisis; they are facing a crisis that calls into question their legitimacy. Unless the next four years are highlighted by real hard-nosed decision making and bone-jarring fiscal realignment there will be hard times for the us and the world. It will be a very different place and decidedly less comfortable. Batman’s predictions may not be far from the mark.
I pray otherwise but am preparing for the worst.
Skip, What I mean by a quick vs. protracted war is this:
The rocket buildup in Lebanon and Gaza almost guarantees quick escalation in the next conflict. Iran is either blowing smoke or they aren’t. I’d bet on the latter. Bibi won’t go into a MacBeth soliloquy “Should I shouldn’t I strike back at provocation”. As rockets rain on Tel Aviv and civilian casualties mount, he’ll respond with carpet bombing of Gaza and the Bekaa Valley. As Syria seeks to re-supply their allies, Israel will interdict the re-supply causing Assad to attempt a move in the Golan starting a two front war. Iran at this point will either block the straits of Hormuz to influence world opinion or actually start lobbing missiles at Israel. If it’s the latter, all bets are off and the Masada option may be on the table. A protracted ground war doesn’t seem to fit this scenario. Just one man’s opinion.
Batman’s posts are very interesting.
Anton/54–” . . . may well breakup due to centripidal forces.”
Did you mean “centrifugal”?
RWE/49–IOW, it’s easier to get forgiveness than it is permission. The folks in DC probably thought you’d gotten them off the hook.
batman –
Interesting future/past history.
The only fault I can find is that your projections are too far in the future.
josh @ 5:
That’s nonsense, notwithstanding the fact that so many people claim to believe it.
A state with an effective monopoly on violence is a tyrrany.
For most of the history of the United States, no agency of the government (nor all the agencies collectively) had an effective monopoly on violence — that’s one of the hallmarks of a free society.
When citizens “take the law into their own hands” they’re doing exactly what freedom sometimes requires.
F @ 7:
The ruling class believes itself to BE the country — “L’etat, c’est moi” writ large.
So no, it won’t voluntarily get out of the way. It must be forced out, at by any means necessary.
Trang, Guerrilla and air wars don’t settle anything. They can offer temporary fixes and that is about all. By temporary I mean until the weaker side has built up it’s strength. To get a conclusion, you need those famous boots on the ground.
Look at WW1. The Anglo alliance never occupied Germany. That is the reason there was a follow up war in ’39. After the Germans lost that one, they were occupied. Still are today, 65 years later.
All bombing Iran will do is put off the date at which they go nuclear. Nothing wrong with that.
Arab terrorism will never destroy Israel. It can and does make life uncomfortable for the Jews.
There has never been a war where both sides had and used nukes. Hopefully, there never will be.
Since war is robbery between nations, not sure just how useful nukes are. It is hard to rob a glowing crater. Not sure what the market for Tritonite is.
Of course, if you don’t want to rob somebody, just kill them, that creates a different range of opportunities. On a national scale, nukes then become not just desirable but essential. As that Iranian nutter pointed out, Israel is a 1 nuke state.
My point is that there are 31 million Americans either unemployed, under employed, or have given up on looking. Have they given up on voting? If not, that is 31 million votes AGAINST the Democrats. The traditional war to get those folks back to work is start a war. Before they vote you out of office.
56. Gordon; Right you are! And you were quicker than I to spot it. Good eyes.
60. mariner ; My point exactly, unfortunately (for them) they are backing into it. It took centuries of financial shenanigans for the Bourbons to wreck the French economy, the elites are wanting to take over after they have wrecked the productive centers. Sort of like getting promoted to captain after the Titanic hit the iceberg.
61. Skip “As that Iranian nutter pointed out, Israel is a 1 nuke state.”
And you can bet they are painfully aware of that. Thus they will have little compunction in exacting a full, unhesitating and utter revenge if they are on the receiving end of a nuke. Better than Masada, they can take their killers with them.
Too bad this does not mean anything to the Iranian Nutter with the bomb, he is looking for exactly such a scenario. I ask, why is it that we are adverse to providing him an opportunity to act the martyr?
RE: starting a war, the Dems (Obama particularly) might try as much to look tough, to gain an advantage at the polls, but it would be months, a year even, before that made even a dimple in the unemployment levels. We just can’t use much more than a million or so soldiers. Weapons production would take months to gear up and it doesn’t employ very many people. This, of course, means little to the Resident as he has no clue about the fussy little details of actually running things.
If it wasn’t so sad thinking about Obama trying to look tough would be amusing.
I rather suspect that Israel has a launch-on-warning policy vis a vis Iran.
If so, Iran is riding the tiger. The dismount is the touchy part. It rather resembles the last moments of a male praying mantis courtship. The head goes first!
I do not believe that the mullahs in anyway comprehend the danger. Instead, they’re locked into a ritual fire dance chanting to allah. Outsiders influence them not. Perversely, the more anyone details the risk the more it is disdained. You’re looking at total group think.
Such has occurred before: Tojo’s Japan. Even top rank insiders were unable to bring home the reality.
Just as the Shinto Japanese, I expect the Iranians to build and build — and then go for a first strike. The attempt will be to create a sole-prosperity sphere whereby Hyper-Shi’ite Iran sweeps up all of her neighbors in a lightening war.
Her suicide armies will be pawned to Israel while she repeats her swamp-boat campaign against the Gulf Arabs. Obviously, suicide troops will take-out the Arab despots at a stroke. A confab of Arab states would be a natural. Said attack will be blamed upon the Jews, of course.
The need for Tehran to intervene to save islam will be as hollow as Stalin’s rescue of the Poles, mid-September 1939.
Counter-action on the part of the Zero will be a prayer-vigil upon the WH rug. After all, Iran will have credibly placed suicide troops with WMD all over the West.
Obviously, Europe is on the phone demanding ‘restraint’ by 0.
That’s the future the mullah’s see.
Jizra as far as the eye can see.
That Iran has advance parties floating around Araby trying to assassinate leaders is an ill kept secret in intelligence circles. That such parties operate under various cut-outs is transparent. However slim, these arrangements will stump the MSM.
The need to get verification before they run a story will always make them look like idiots and fools to the perpetrators. By the time they figure out what happened the story will be in textbooks.
—–
It looks like Putin & Co want to stick their finger in our AfPak pie. It certainly is not aimed at helping the situation.
Waving the flag of drug-trafficking, Putin wants to get replanted in AfPak before the shape of things to come solidifies. Russia tried thwarting the poppy crop before and it was a fiasco. If Putin is at all serious about stopping narcotics then he should chase down the mules and players operating with corrupt governments who ship opiates in bulk.
Not the slightest effort in that direction is evident.
——
On another level, Putin wants to study our day to day COIN tactics from the inside. We’d be crazy to let him in. I expect that we shall soon learn of a policy shift coming from 0 to let Russia into the NATO zone as the Dutch pull out.
It is significant that the primary reason for Dutch involvement was and is opiate traffic to Europe! How did that work out?
Blert;
“By the time they figure out what happened the story will be in textbooks.”
You are killing me man! I am sitting here at work laughing out loud and my co-workers (some of whom already doubt my sanity) are looking at me with worried expressions.
batman @ 48: “However, by 2027 the world was again plunged into a deep recession.”
We wish! Let’s hope we are out of the current recession by 2027.
I have to agree with fnord @ 58 — things are going to start happening a whole lot faster.
Remember, the US is running a huge trade deficit as well as a budget deficit. And the flip-side of that deficit — trade surpluses with the US — is what makes the German & Chinese economies look good. The trade imbalance is unsustainable, and unwinding it will hurt others more than the US.
Further, demographically, time is not on several players sides. Thanks to the one-child policy, China has a multi-million surplus of fighting-age young males right now, soon to be replaced by an aging population. And thanks to vodka, Russia is facing a decline in its fighting-age population. The demographic disaster facing Europe is well known, creating a vacuum which will be filled by the first mover. Some players in this world cannot afford to wait too long.
The global situation is unsustainable, and highly unstable. Once a (probably unanticipated) trigger event happens, things will change very quickly. The ability to make and to do will become much more valuable. The ability to cite laws and to fill in bureaucratic forms will become almost valueless. The world will change, but it will go on.
#65. Kinuachdrach
The ability to make and to do will become much more valuable. The ability to cite laws and to fill in bureaucratic forms will become almost valueless.
And that, my friend, is what scares them the most. Too many of the “government workers” occupy positions which place them in what I like to think of as the synthetic middle class. They make a middle class living for providing services that no one would ever want, and often they do it at low, low, levels of efficiency that would never be tolerated in the private sector. A lot of them if thrown out into the private sector would be reduced to minimum wage jobs, which is what they are worth.
Gosh—Baby I wish we really could afford to pay an auditor from the IRS to come in and audit our tax returns for the last five years–but we just can’t afford it, but on the bright side Sugar Blossom we just might be able to come up with the money to hire a government inspector this year to determine if our furniture arrangements violate the laws against accessibility for the disabled. Yeah—–
With few exceptions government workers don’t provide any goods or services that anybody really wants, but that is what a healthy economy does provide: goods and services that people want and are willing to pay for.
And where did most of the “stimulus” money go to? Mostly to people who provide goods and services that people don’t want or need: gubmint workers.
The Iranian ‘Everglades Navy’ is revealing.
Obviously, they are useless against the USN.
But such craft did provide Iran with their biggest wartime coup against Iraqi marshlands. The mullahs totally out flanked Saddam.
Flash forward: the Speedo crowd zips across the Gulf and lands SEAL style all over Shi’ite lands in KSA — the Eastern Shores.
They stash their gear and drive rental cars into the burgs. Then, whammo: a new anti-Sunni cell gets rolling in the oil fields just in time to see the King and Brothers assassinated. The National Guard is reduced to infantry because someone sabotaged their gear. By the time the Sunnis get to the coast their co-religionists have been eliminated.
Possession plus Nukes = 100% of the Law of Force.
Iran, of course, has customers ready and willing to take ARAMCO crude off their hands. Iran can promise that nothing will happen to the Straits or deliveries IF hostilities cease.
Under a nuclear umbrella such an outcome would seem quite probable. Stranger things have happened.
One thing you can be sure, the Zero would not interfere in such a minor spat.
Instead, we’d all be joining him in saying our prayers.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/182a2b70-b130-11df-b899-00144feabdc0.html
This is the end for dollarization in China. This is a necessary prelude to China ditching the dollar.
Beware.
China owns trillions of US dollars, and we’re asking them to discount them, and they don’t want to. Heh. Of such odd things is peace made. Though I suppose, when the time come when they *have* to discount them, of such things peace is NOT made.
How such a bunch of mediocrities every acquired so much power, fame and influence will be a mystery that future historians can devote tomes to solving.
Here’s a hint:
One cause is a debased American educational system nestled inside a society that has defined every concept of value down to sub-basement levels.
Tcobb #65:
While I was at the Pentagon I read an article that described a government program in NYC to go into poor people’s homes and make basic repairs. The program had 4 to 5 part time workers that were called in and paid as required to do specific jobs: plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, etc.
And to manage those 4 to 5 part time workers the program had 17 full time supervisors.
I mentioned this to our secretary, a black GS-5 not noted for her work ethic, and she replied to the effect that was fine; at least those 17 people had jobs and were working.
On another occasion we were holding a meeting to discuss how to handle sites on government property that had been contaminated by previous activities. It was clear that we would not have enough money to clean them all up, so the question became “Which ones, if any, do we prioritize for clean up?”
The question was directed to the GS civilian who had the expertise in the area. His answer was stunningly candid, “If you ask me I’ll tell you to clean them all up. That is my field and the more work there is for me, the better the chance that I will not be laid off or that I even will be promoted.”
Most of the government civilians I worked with were not like that. But there are plenty that are.
The question was directed to the GS civilian who had the expertise in the area. His answer was stunningly candid, “If you ask me I’ll tell you to clean them all up. That is my field and the more work there is for me, the better the chance that I will not be laid off or that I even will be promoted.”
Behold, the self-licking ice cream cone: Washington, D.C.
It’s like getting a sack-o-s**t and dumping it on your own head.
Wretchard, you are a gentleman through and through, and such a prince of prose, that when you write something as blunt as this, it’s like watching Laurence Olivier do stand-up comedy. And do it really well. Thanks for a (surely unintended) belly laugh.
71@RWE Wildly OT, but I am sure you can relate to this DoD procurement story. Last May, we put in a request for a 1 – 2 Terrabyte hard drive to put in an existing machine so that we could stand up a local Oracle server for our users because the boys at the Pentagon had a bad habit of rebooting the existing Oracle machine randomly and destroying data. I could have, and was willing to, walk over to the Pentagon City Best Buy and get the stupid thing for $200 tops.
But, Noooooooooooooooooooooooo. Only guvmint equipment can be used in guvmint systems. The request had to go up the chain to the CIO who sent back a questionaire that asked, “How does this acquisition fit in with your Strategic Plan?”. Once approved, the request went out for bid.
We finally got the drive in March, ten months later. The next hurdle was to get Win 2003 Server put on the machine so we could take advantage of the multiple cores and extra memory. That took until last week. We are loading the machine and hope to deploy it to our users next week — 15 months later.
But as your GS-5 said, all the people involved have jobs, and important things to do. So what if nothing gets done?
This is what we have to look forward to when health care is free.
mariner @ 59: For most of the history of the United States, no agency of the government (nor all the agencies collectively) had an effective monopoly on violence — that’s one of the hallmarks of a free society.
I do not know to what violent act it is that you refer, which has not been illegal in several jurisdictions at once from the earliest days of our country, and for that matter in English common law going back a millenium. Beating your wife, your dog, your child, a slave? The NFL? What?
What concerns me is how the terrorists took out the twin towers. If they could go about causing that kind of destruction in such a nefarious, underhanded way once, why aren’t people more concerned that something of that nature but worse will happen again? Before September 11 who would have thought they would fly airplanes into skyscrapers to knock them down and cause mass murder? The unthinkable is what I think of when I think of the threat Islam imposes on America. We Americans walk around day after day with these people as our neighbors in every major city and yet it could very well be that they are plotting and planning the next 9/11. It truly was an act of cowardice and true Americans must brace themselves for the lowest of the low when considering what terrorists are capable of. They can’t launch missiles at us from across the Canadian border like they can do to Israel with its terror-friendly neighbors bordering it. But they can be creative, they have proven they can at least be that.
#71. RWE
…at least those 17 people had jobs and were working…
A common mistake with many government employees. They assume that having a job is synonymous with actually working, often because they have no idea what working, rather than just having a paid position, actually means.
I think the best example that I know of is that of a friend of mine who got a job in a state position. She was a very good and hard worker. What she found when she got there was that the work she was expected to perform within an eight hour day could be done within one hour tops. Most of her co-workers spent most of the day gossiping, and three hour lunch breaks were not uncommon. The sheer boredom of doing nothing for an extended period of time actually caused her extreme stress, and finally she quit.
This is not to say that all government employees are like this, I really don’t and can’t know. But I do know that there are a significant number of them out there that are exactly like that.
They are the lower end of the political class. People who get middle class salaries for doing virtually nothing. One thing that is often ignored when it comes to handing out government money is how much it costs to hand out that money. If it costs two dollars to hand out one dollar to the “deserving” something is truly wrong indeed, at least from my point of view.
But the world of the government truly is based upon unicorns and rainbows. Its certainly not based on reality. I remember from some years back that someone got a Federal grant of $80,000 to make a study of Peruvian brothels. Oh how I wish to the core of my soul that there had been competitive bidding for that project. I think I could have done that research for a lot less money and with much enthusiasm.
Tcobb @ 76: bemused by your story. My current contract gig at Megabank has me working with large crews of people who, for the most part, work hard four to eight hours a day – accomplishing nothing. Is this preferable to government employees who take three-hour lunch breaks from gossiping?
Y’know, there *is* competitive bidding, of a sort, for that Peruvian brothel gig, academic grantsmanship. From what I’ve seen of it, it’s more or less like writing a business plan, if you can do simple math and write a good paragraph that puts you ahead of 80% of the crowd. Attach a good school letterhead to the academic plan, or a nice white-shoe country-club fellow to the business plan, and away you go on wings of OPL.
OPL? meant OPM.
I’ve been reading Evelyn Waugh’s “A Tourist in Africa,” and he speaks of a historical episode I had never come across before, the “Groundnuts Scheme” of the British Labour party after WWII.
In short, it was a scheme to grow peanuts in Africa to make up for shortages in cooking oils and such after the war in Britain. Well, it’s a long and sordid tale, full of the stupidities of Lefist governments. You know, minor details like choosing an area for farming that didn’t actually have any water (Waugh writes with great dripping sarcasm: “The site at Kongwa had been selected for its emptiness. It was empty because it was waterless”). And a dozen more equally idiotic ideas.
But my favorite, because so typical, is this (and here I quote Waugh):
The Labour Government conceived it as their duty as trustees of the native races to institute Trades Unions and sent salaried officials to teach them how to strike for higher pay. In the first year their efforts were rewarded. The Europeans working at Kongwa had to be enrolled as special constables and organized in armed patrols for the protection of themselves and their servants. Bands of African spearmen blocked the roads. The railway stopped running. The tractors lay idle.
So the Leftist British government, in its condescending genius, sends people to rouse up union activity against it’s own project!
Long story short: over 49 million British Pounds sterling were spent, resulting in almost nothing at all. This is your government at work for you.
You can read more about it here:
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/groundnt.htm
Meanwhile, I very much recommend Waugh’s “A Tourist in Africa.” He writes of a world long gone (he toured there in 1959) that will never come back.
I leave you with Waugh’s comment on the cause of the great groundnut fiasco.
The fault was pride; the hubris which leads elected persons to believe that a majority at the polls endues them with inordinate abilities.
#77. Josh
My current contract gig at Megabank has me working with large crews of people who, for the most part, work hard four to eight hours a day – accomplishing nothing. Is this preferable to government employees who take three-hour lunch breaks from gossiping?
The difference is that sustained stupidity in a for profit enterprise results in bankruptcy. In a governmental agency it usually means they get a bigger budget because, it will be asserted, they don’t have enough resources to get the task done.
Private sector enterprises often do stupid things when the management culture flips over into the Twilight Zone. I know. And once you get to a certain level of twits in upper management no one else but another twit will be allowed into the club. Its corporate cancer, sometimes curable if someone buys the company and drop kicks upper management out.
74. Josh
When did you stop beating your wife?
I stopped beating the NFL back in the ’80s.
Stephanie:
What’s amazing to me is just how narrow minded the terrorists are.
Many people can be creative. Without going into details, it is rather easy to daydream about mass casualty attacks. The problem with explaining anything in a public forum is that our enemies may be listening. I don’t want to give them ideas.
“The difference is that sustained stupidity in a for profit enterprise results in bankruptcy.”
Not in a bank, it doesn’t. Particularly in a large one that is “too big to fail” and thus susceptible to being bailed out by government. And certainly not for the individuals involved. A UK example: Royal Bank of Scotland was put out of business by its casino (trading) division, and is now 83% owned by the UK government. And nobody got fired or made redundant, and they are still handing out six-figure bonuses.
It doesn’t apply to lawyers, either. The lawyer I hired to deal with my father’s estate took 18 months to finish a 4-month job. They still got paid. Unfortunately, most people don’t have enough experience with hiring lawyers, or enough need for them, to act on such an experience. So they continue to get away with staggering degrees of sloth and inefficiency.
Tcobb #76:
Yes. And as I often say the only thing worse than a lazy government bureaucrat who is not doing his job is an energetic one that takes his job seriously.
This year I was given a task on our contract to download a bunch of data off a NASA server so we could do some analysis of it. They allocated me 160 manhours to do that. So I started plugging away, only to discover that due to Internet drop outs you could only download a small amount of the data at one time. Then you had to go back and figure out where it dropped out and download again from that point. It really was going to take 160 MH to do it.
I decided this was ridiculous, got in the car and drove over to NASA, tracked down the guy who owned the data, handed him a portable hard drive and instead of 160 MH it took only 20 MH. They then expanded the task to include another set of data and using the same approach I got that done in 1 MH.
Now, it would have been easy for me to have gotten the data and then charged the whole 160 MH of work, but I did not do that. So I outsmarted myself out of over $3K worth of income.
Unfortunately there are those in government service, both civilian and uniformed military, who would have taken the direction to do things the inefficient way as gospel, and the wasting of taxpayer money as a right.
There are lots of erudite thoughts here, which are appreciated. One question, though: is anybody posting here actually DOING anything about the situation, like working for a local candidate for that, what is it, election coming up? Is anybody here actually pounding the streets, putting up signs, telephoning people, knocking on doors? It might be helpful.
Actually GBArg I have spent the better part of the past year working on campaigns in different elections. The first was for the Mayor of my hometown, a lesser of two evils certainly, but aside from his recent Mosque adoration, a guy who knows how to get things done. The second was a special election to fill a vacated City Council seat; the candidate I supported was the less Orthodox of two Orthodox Jewish candidates. His opponent didn’t even care to appeal to anyone outside his own synagogue because he thought he would rally more of his supporters than our guy. Our guy spent his Sundays at the local Church reaching out to the Italian Americans, and we also sent canvassers into the Chinese neighborhoods. Our guy won hands down.
After that campaign I was referred to the organization that was campaigning for our state’s entry in the Race to the Top Competition. Our state won a large amount of money. I will be working for them again this fall when they decide which candidates in the local state senate races are most committed to education reform and willing to support charter schools.
So yes to answer your erudite question; many of the posters on the BC put their money where their mouths are. Or talk the talk because we walk the walk. Hope that helps to clear up your confusion.
GBArg…
Our most prominent posters are out in the field. You’re new enough to not even notice their absence.
Please review back-threads.
Cheers.
Dearest Blert, your #63 sez: “However slim, these arrangements will stump the MSM.
The need to get verification before they run a story will always make them look like idiots and fools to the perpetrators.”
I know it’s cumbersome, but I would just revise that to something like, “The need to LOOK LIKE THEY BOTHERED to get verification…”
Lying Traitors, you know…
WRT controlling the narrative, a process the Old Gray Lady will be tolerably familiar with, a vibrant example is today’s immense gathering around the Reflecting Pool at the fool of the Lincoln Memorial. MSMinimization of crowd size will be difficult, as there was a news chopper orbiting, Drudge already has the photo, it was a regular Sermon on the Mount / Woodstock magnitude crowd.
Beyond the mean liberal “thought leadership” pathetic flailing at the numbers, the former Controllers of the Narrative portray this spiritual, calm, dedicated gathering as full-bore nooses and cross-burnin’ festival for the NASCAR retards.
Beck venerated each hero, temple by temple, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Martin, and then World War II, Vietnam and Korea memorials. Palin came on as “the mother of a combat veteran” to introduce Marcus Lattrell and other combat wounded heroes. People recited the Pledge, sang the Anthem, bowed their heads in prayers, it was like being in church for three hours with the crowd silent, attentive, respectful.
There were kids with Moms and Dads, plenty of boomers – first guy I bumped into who was bringing his 7 year old son, agreed it was like seeing the Dead at Watkins Glen in ’73 with 600K dear friends, and surprisingly lots of twenty-somethings of all styles. People were sweet to each other, I passed a group of leather-jacket vets, and from the other direction a Mom led her young son to them saying “Here they are, these are the Vietnam Vets” as she and her son following shook each of their hands, Mom saying “Thank you for your service.”
We used to call it Peace, Love and Happiness. Today was old-school – Faith, Hope and Charity.
It was BEAUTIFUL, man!
Even though, just like at Watkins Glen, I had to watch the show from way out behind Don’s Johns. Sound was good. The crowd’s the main thing anyway, my fellow Americans.
As some might say to the Old Gray Lady: “Control this!”
RE: Batman’s Looking Backward – 2032 – 2010 4 posts.
Terrible and linear view of the future. But the future is a non-linear, chaotic system. And the Laws of Physics do apply to the political system. In that, I mean that the actions of the left will trigger a opposite and nonlinear reaction. Your future history assumes that there will only be a reaction at the ballot box. I think this is shortsighted. At a minimum, the Union will start dissolving in the next 2-6 years with conservative states stepping over the side. There WILL be bloodshed, as 40-50% of the general public will not put with the parasites stealing elections and packing the courts. I think we are not going to stand by meekly and allow the parasites to establish a totalitarian state and kill us slowly via regulation and taxation and judicial fiat.
Helluva a thought provoking series of posts, though. Cheers -