Sliding Down the Mountain

Andrew Hacker wrote in the New York Review of Books several years ago, in a book review on affluence and its effects:

The average American family now has two and a half times the purchasing power of its 1947 counterpart. Affluence for such a family isn’t wealth; many have heavy debts and are unprepared for calamities. But they frequent suburban malls, crowd the nation’s airports, and are helping their children through college. Offer’s statistics suggest that at least two thirds of Americans are in this pool, whereas in 1947 only one in three were.

Question: is this what is happening in this decade of slow, grinding, economic decline? That we're slowly declining in 'affluence' to that of our parents/grandparents in 1947?

Gay Marriage

If you struggle to come to grips with the arguments for and against gay marriage, this post by blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is both gay and married, and the corresponding NYT column by Ross Douthet are a pretty good place to begin.

Losing the Rule of Law

Another edition of the 'Gospel according to Kunstler':

Here are some truths which I believe to be self-evident: that the USA has been running on fumes since the beginning of the 21st century. That you can't get something for nothing, and attempts to do so always end in tears. That massive expenditures of energy produce equivalent globs of entropy - which you can translate to "bad ju-ju" or the tendency of whatever can go wrong to go wrong. That because we're unwilling to re-scale and reform the things we do, nature is about to do it for us. That America has transformed itself from a nation of earnest, muscular, upright citizens to a land of overfed barbarous morons ruled by grifters. That what has been economics is about to turn dangerously political.

The greatest loss of the last decade was not in 401-Ks or manufacturing jobs or foreclosed houses, but the rule of law. Without genuine rule of law, anything goes and nothing matters. As a consequence of that, finally, everything goes. The rule of law is what kept foreigners buying our debt all these years (the fumes we've been running on). They kept buying because they believed, when all was said and done, that Americans would enforce contracts and regulate behavior in the direction of fair dealing - not for it's own sake but because it made things work better. But when the rule of law goes here, the rest of the world will notice its absence. They'll stop believing in our money and our future. They'll cash out and we'll wash out. Then, as human tribes are wont, they may just turn around and kick our ass because we're down.

Chastened Non-Pacifist

This post by Andrew Sullivan on war is pretty amazing.  I beat Andrew to his 'chastened non-pacifist' position by about ten years, since I publicly opposed the Iraqi invasion.  But given that many thousands of people read him everyday while almost nobody reads my blog, I'm glad he switched.

Our Neighbor to the North

Despite being neighbors and Anglophile nations, the U.S. and Canada are quite different. I noticed growing up in the 50s and 60s that when we would cross the Canadian border at Niagara Falls, that the Canadian side was always nicer: less run down, more beautiful. More recently, Canada escaped the worst of the 2008 Great Recession, with a much more stable banking system. And despite what some say about their health care system, I have a pastor friend who moved to Canada, and he swears by their system.  I would LOVE their system, compared to our broken down, inequitable, horribly expensive health care system.

Now Ezra Klein tells us that Canada has about twice as good income mobility as the US.  Drat! This is getting ridiculous.

The Future of Health Care

In another stunning illustration of the economic problem facing us, a reader of the Daily Dish writes in to share about the last days of his 88 year old father-in-law in the local hospital.  The hospital bill for the last two weeks of life?

By the way, we got the bill a month later. For a 14 day stay, it came to $516,779.34.

That's almost $37,000 a day. And that's one of the big things wrong with our health care system: it's too high-tech, too intensive, not careful about costs.  It is going to bankrupt us as a nation if we're not really careful.  I would bet you good money that that kind of hospital care in Canada or France would be a whole lot less expensive while just as compassionate and careful.

Ps. I went to find a picture of an elderly person on a respirator and the website of this medical equipment company had only one picture....the other hundreds of pictures were all of children or people under 40.  I guess they want you to think it mostly young people who are sick and in the hospital.

The Great Stagnation

From Ed Luce and the Financial Times (via the Daily Dish):

Technically speaking, Mark Freeman should count himself among the ­luckiest ­people on the planet. The 52-year-old lives with his family on a tree-lined street in his own home in the heart of the wealthiest country in the world. When he is hungry, he eats. When it gets hot, he turns on the air-conditioning. When he wants to look something up, he surfs the internet. One of the songs he likes to sing when he hosts a weekly karaoke evening is Johnny Cash’s “Man in Black”.

Yet somehow things don’t feel so good any more. Last year the bank tried to repossess the Freemans’ home even though they were only three months in arrears. Their son, Andy, was recently knocked off his mother’s health insurance and only painfully reinstated for a large fee. And, much like the boarded-up houses that signal America’s epidemic of foreclosures, the drug dealings and shootings that were once remote from their neighbourhood are edging ever closer, a block at a time.

What is most troubling about the Freemans is how typical they are. Neither Mark nor Connie – his indefatigable wife, who is as chubby as he is gaunt – suffer any chronic medical conditions. Both have jobs at the local ­Methodist Hospital, he as a warehouse receiver and distributor, she as an anaesthesia supply technician. At $70,000 a year, their joint gross income is more than a third higher than the median US household.

Once upon a time this was called the American Dream. Nowadays it might be called America’s Fitful Reverie. Indeed, Mark spends large monthly sums renting a machine to treat his sleep apnea, which gives him insomnia. “If we lost our jobs, we would have about three weeks of savings to draw on before we hit the bone,” says Mark, who is sitting on his patio keeping an eye on the street and swigging from a bottle of Miller Lite. “We work day and night and try to save for our retirement. But we are never more than a pay check or two from the streets.”

Mention middle-class America and most foreigners envision something timeless and manicured, from The Brady Bunch, say, or Desperate Housewives in which teenagers drive to school in sports cars and the girls are always cheerleading. This might approximate how some in the top 10 per cent live. The rest live like the Freemans. Or worse.

THIS is the future of middle-class America...and worse. What could change the trajectory? Sadly, nothing that I'm aware of. 

Faux Conservatism

Andrew Sullivan describes what has been called 'conservatism' for the last 30 years:

...all of this was not conservatism as it should be, but the degenerate mockery of conservatism that has come to dominate the GOP: a blend of fiscal abandon, politicized religion, lawless foreign policy and utter electoral cynicism. Until this is confronted, owned and refudiated, we may have a Republican future ahead, but not a conservative one.

The Longest, Latest American War

The straight-shooting Ralph Nader speaks a perspective on the Afghan War that also speaks for me in this article in Countpunch:

The war in Afghanistan is nearly nine years old—the longest in American history. After the U.S. quickly toppled the Taliban regime in October 2001, the Taliban, by all accounts, came back stronger and harsher enough to control now at least 30 percent of the country. During this time, U.S. casualties, armaments and expenditures are at record levels.

America’s overseas wars have different outcomes when they have no constitutional authority, no war tax, no draft, no regular on the ground press coverage, no Congressional oversight, no spending accountability and, importantly, no affirmative consent of the governed who are, apart from the military families, hardly noticing.

This is an asymmetrical, multi-matrix war. It is a war defined by complex intrigue, shifting alliances, mutating motivations, chronic bribery, remotely-generated civilian deaths, insuperable barriers of language and ethnic and subtribal conflicts. It is fought by warlords, militias, criminal gangs, and special forces discretionary death squads. Millions of civilians are impoverished, terrified and live with violent disruptions. There is no central government to speak of. The White House uses illusions of strategies and tactics to bid for time. In Afghanistan, the historic graveyard of invaders, hope springs infernal....

President Obama says the soldiers should start coming home in July 2011, depending on conditions on the ground. He wants the Taliban commanders, whom he is destroying one by one, to agree to negotiations with Kabul that requires their subservience. His formula is peace through more war. But the Taliban are not known to surrender. They know the terrain where they live and they believe they can wear Obama down, notwithstanding U.S. special forces and drones expected to stay there for years.

Congress—an inkblot so far—needs to assert its constitutional authority over budgets and policy toward the war. Members are regular rubber-stamps of White House recklessness under Bush and Obama.

Furthermore, nothing will happen without a few million Americans back home stomping, marching and bellowing to end the boomeranging, costly invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and concentrate on America’s needs at home.

I Wondered About This Myself

Glenn Greenwald puts his finger on an important issue: why the recent 'Top Secret America' series has had so little impact:

Political elites don't even feel compelled to pretend to be able or willing to do anything about this. Just think about this: on Monday, the Post documents a vast Secret Government bequeathed with unimaginable secrecy and unaccountability, and the rest of the week is filled with stories of the administration's blocking greater oversight and plans to escalate the privitization of our National Security and Surveillance State. That's why there was so little government angst over the Post's "revelations": aside from the fact that it revealed little that wasn't already known (Priest and Arkin withheld substantial amounts of information at the Government's request), even the impact of having the Post trumpet these facts was not a threat to much of anything, since there's nobody in a position to do much about this even if they wanted to. And few people seem to want to.

It's not hard to understand why. Why would the political class possibly want to subvert or weaken their ability to exercise vast spying, detention, and military powers in the dark? They don't. Beyond that, as the Post series highlights, Top Secret America provides not only the ability to exercise vast power with no accountability, but also enables the transfer of massive amounts of public wealth to the private national security and surveillance corporations which own the Government. Very few people with political power have the incentive to do anything about that. It's probably best not to hold your breath waiting for Dianne Feinstein -- the Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who lives in lavish wealth as a result of her husband's investments in the National Security State (and whose Senate career has a way of oh-so-coincidentally bolstering their wealth) -- to meaningfully address any of the issues raised by the Post series. Despite Feinstein's rhetoric to the contrary, doing so is decidedly not in her interests for multiple reasons.