Destiny

America, when will you embrace your rightful destiny?

When will you accept that the same advertising coercing your subconscious to buy overpriced annuities, sweatshop shoes and half-pound hamburgers has in turn rendered melting icecaps, starvation and drowning equally palatable.

Coal is clean!  Haven’t you heard?  Crude Oil, it’s not just for breakfast anymore!   So dust off the convertible and fill up the tank – it’s 1959 – for as long as you want it be.

When oil sheiks and Wall Street parasites need your consumption so badly, America, how can you possibly refuse?  After sixty years of uninterrupted self indulgence, surely you see that you are too old, too vain, too fat and too stupid to heal the planet – now?!   Instead, do what you do best and light the sky on fire in your lifetime.

America, Jesus is calling!  But first – Armageddon!  Just like the Bible (and Sarah Palin) promises…

Glenn Beck, Guardian of the American Way of Life

And the only problem is that Glenn Beck’s American Way of Life is today a sewer pumping effluent and debt down the throats of ninety-nine percent of the citizens of planet Earth, including the Unites States of America.  It is a toxic dream machine, relying on advertising and corporate political manipulation to prey upon humanity’s collective unconscious for the near exclusive benefit of oil sheiks, CEOs and Wall Street parasites.

You’re right about one thing, Mr. Beck.  The battle is us versus them.  But it’s also us versus us.  And our planet and any civilized way of life on it is doomed so long as the majority refuses to mutually and simultaneously join both battles.

Old lady and young reporter at Glenn Beck’s 912/tea-bag rally in DC…

MAX BLUMENTHAL: So you're saying if the government eliminates Social Security and Medicare then you'll get out of the program?

WOMAN: No, I said if they get out of my life.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Out of your Social Security and-

WOMAN: No, out of everything.

OK then, old-selfish-pig-hypocrite-lady!  I guess it’s time to take our checks back then (taxes paid by young people to benefit old people).  And I say we start with YOU!

New Religion?

Did you ever think you'd live to see Mad Max become reality?

How many more years? 10? 25? 50? before Road Warrior is us?

The certitude that there is no salvation is [itself] a form of salvation. --E.M. Cioran.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_13335560

Repeat after me…

I accept that the protean, nihilistic revolution, securitized by my labor, for the benefit of billionaire Wall Street parasites, is now complete.  I accept there is no future like the one “as seen on TV.”  I see that striving for escape or transcendence from consumer subjugation through blasé self-indulgence, hatred and rage has wasted my very limited time.  Henceforth, I will strive to become each new day -- on its terms not mine.

Though capitalism and religion have almost destroyed the biosphere, they have not destroyed me.  I am still human!  I harbor the capacity to adapt and transform, to embrace increasing entropy, to starve failure rather than trust in it, to liberate my body from brain eating corporate food,  to plant vegetables, to drill freshwater wells, to put up solar panels… to prepare for and enjoy collapse.

Mandatory Retirement

One more, New Rule for the New Normal, collapsed U.S. consumer, debt-driven economy:  Anyone over age 65 that is not employed cannot be counted in Federal unemployment statistics.

In short, America can no longer afford to be led by the same, old, white, self-centered, less-capable (e.g. not computer literate) generation that led it to ruin over the last 50 years.

A perfect example – someone too old to lead a government supported firm – is new GM chairman, Ed Whitacre.  I find GM’s ads with Whitacre -- implying some kind of new day for GM – patently offensive, simply because the person touting GM products is older than my father, who is at least smart and noble enough to have retired.  How many more millions, how many more estates, how many more yachts do you need Mr. Whitacre?  You were chairman of the board and chief executive officer of AT&T Corp – but don’t use email or have a computer in your office.  WTF?!

America has too many problems that require a major, younger, less individualistic – less what’s in it for me -- rethink.  Old people -- that melted the icecaps, that didn’t switch our nation off fossil fuels after the ‘74 embargo and that continue to vote to increase unfunded health care benefits (e.g. Medicare Part D) for themselves -- while 50 million are uninsured in this country and anyone not on Medicare is dropped for becoming sick – cannot be trusted to fix America.

Old People of America: You had your chance.  And just look at the world you’re leaving behind.  You have clearly demonstrated you are permanently conditioned to insane levels of individualism and greed and that you fundamentally lack capacity for collective social responsibility.  Now, please get out of our way, before the rest of us must force you to – so those of us that can use computers, that innately demonstrate needed capacity for increasing automation and efficiency and that care less about ourselves and more about our society and planet, can move forward.  You failed!  Now get out of the way and give the future a chance.

Closed for Reconstruction: Credit Card Street

U.S. consumers are paying down revolving debt at record rates – $21B/month in July – experts predicted only $4B.

Sesame Street is teaching families to cope with hard times…

Sunny Day.
Sweeping the clouds away.
On, my way, to where I live debt free.
Can you tell me how to get… how to get off Credit Card street?

Now if Obama’s Fed could just come to grips with this New Normal reality – stop trying to restore Wall Street’s status quo, Armageddon tickers.  Crushing the dollar by increasing debt insures only continuing American decline.  In other words, current (Republican/Wall Street) Fed policy solves none of America’s long term problems:  Not under-employment.  Not health care.  Not education.  Not global warming.  Not falling living standards.

In short, the Future belongs to savers, creditors and investors not to gamblers, Ponzi-schemers and debtors.

New Rules for the New Normal:

• Debt <> Growth
• Growth <> Progress
• Progress <> Real progress (absent sustainability)
• Real progress <> (destabilizing) Income Gap (richest to poorest)
• Capitalism <> Democracy
• Democracy <> Intelligence (e.g. “Keep the government out of my Social Security and Medicare!” = WTF?!)

Real leaders lead!  They don’t flinch from risk or quiver and equivocate before opinion polls and opposition propaganda.  They tax and regulate chaos and failure -- greed, cronyism, obesity, disease, debt – out of existence.  They incentivize real, sustainable progress.  That’s what FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and Johnson did well – despite flaws and mistakes they found a way to leave America better in their wakes – as Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush did not – or we wouldn’t be in this mess today – a leaderless, elitist, debt-driven, masturbatory kind of democracy, creating, exacerbating then ignoring one crisis after another.

Thus, it’s time for Obama to starting leading America instead of following Wall Street’s libertarian, fast money vision to oblivion.  A majority are likely to follow – and do the better thing.  Take it from the folks on Sesame Street.

Too Late for Teenage Suicide

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/opinion/07douthat.html

Mr. Douthat,

I am sorry I missed the opportunity to comment online. ..

But, as a Montanan, having read the responses your article (Montana possibly joining Oregon and Washington in "legalizing" assisted suicide) generated – I suspect, from fellow members of the PIG (er... I mean "Baby Boom") generation, of which I am an angry (punk rock era),  non-breeding, non-profligate member -- I am compelled to commentary.

Your phrase "fiscal suicide" is exactly right!  And we non-breeding, non-profligate survivors (so far) of this current crooks and idiots phase of American socio-political-economic life know too well this country committed to fiscal suicide a very long time ago (my best guess being 1971 – Nixon’s abandonment of Bretton Woods’ “gold standard” or  perhaps its collective, yawning [non] response to the ‘74 oil embargo and Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech).   At any rate, fiscal suicide seems undoubtedly the fate of  America as most of us know and love it.  I suspect those of us over 40 and under 300 pounds know this:  Ron Paul knows it.  Bill Maher knows it.  You know it.  I know it.  Unfortunately, a huge, aging, diabetic swath of “Keep government out of my Social Security and Medicare!” America does not know (or refuses to admit) it.

So the question is: what can be done, if anything, to render (fiscal) suicide as painless as possible?  For myself, I find I am essentially a burgeoning communist/anarchist/survivalist:  and when the  Mad Max age ensues, I suspect I will be in Montana, armed, off the grid, on (relatively) fresh water and basically as self-contained/sustaining as possible…

But I wonder where the conservative “pundit class” expects to be in ten or twenty years?  After all, democracy and unregulated capitalism cannot coexist forever – Marx (unbounded genius) was absolutely correct about this.  As proof I submit: The United States of America.  QED!

And whether you admit it or not, Mr. Douthat – so do you.

Starve the Beast!

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4856

“The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe, paving the way for more extensive and exhaustive crises.” – Karl Heinrich Marx

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/may2009/rep1-m19.shtml

I agree with WSWS’ conditional analysis (of capitalism) but not with its prescription to defeat it.  I suggest that Marxists are wrong in assuming that real change, or even resistance, must necessarily be confrontational.  Furthermore, one might argue that Marx foresaw and described the capitalist crisis far more accurately and definitively than its subsequent evolution -- to societies eschewing private property,  self interest, war and collapse in favor of shared values and sustainability.

As in Obama’s sudden health care dilemma, pragmatic Marxists and post-consumerists will never succeed with a head-on assault of globalized capitalism.  To try is merely to sacrifice for its own sake, not for progress, economic  sustainability or even resilience.

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/resilience_or_survival.html

Instead we must starve the world hierarchy of exploitation through democratic choice.  We must strive to outlive and undermine capitalism demographically rather than some foolish, fascist attempt to force it at gunpoint into an oven.  In this way, capitalism’s dissenters get to stay alive, out of jail and free from terrorist labels – as wave after wave of crises – for which capitalism has no answers (Peak Everything) ensues, rendering the desire for real change universal for the youngest citizens of this world.

At any rate, I suppose my own musings and solidarity with post-collapse, out-of-the-closet socialism/anarchism explains how it is I came to be a childless miser (a capitalist driven insane, in Marx’ words), living in Montana, striving for a transition-town, off-grid, but grid-tied, way of life.

After all, money ought to be good for something – even if it’s only to survive and to witness (“I told you so!” syndrome) the inevitable collapse of capitalism that Marx so presciently and brilliantly predicted sixteen decades ago.