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You Know You Are A Fading Superpower When...

Even the Aussies start Writing Editorials About it

Nirvana Out of American Reach

THE energy, financial and political woes that grip the US signal a decisive shift in world power, mocking the liberal delusion that Barack Obama or John McCain can return American prestige and power to its pre-Bush year 2000 nirvana. There is no such nirvana. There is instead a new reality: the greatest transfer of income in human history, away from energy importers such as the US to energy exporters; the rise of a new breed of wealthy autocracies that cripple US hopes of dominating the global system; and demands on the US to make fresh compromises in a world where power is rapidly being diversified.

I know that in the halcyon days of the Clinton presidency we thought that globalization meant a world of nations with equal financial status and means. A community of countries where Milton Friedman was right, and the expansion of capitalism had brought liberal democracy and peace to the world.

And most importantly, a world where the US and her allies would be first among equals.

Well, it turns the out the truth of globalization, at least in the short run, is going to be a little trickier than that.

Maybe something more like Neal Stephenson's futurist-post-globalization-economic-apocalypse Snow Crash:

This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it - talking trade balances here - once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have eneved out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here - once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant...once the Invisible Hand has smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity...

Two More From Harpers: Our Phony Economies

Our Phony Economy:

With families the logic is the same. By the standard of the GDP, the worst families in America are those that actually function as families�that cook their own meals, take walks after dinner, and talk together instead of just farming the kids out to the commercial culture. Cooking at home, talking with kids, walking instead of driving, involve less expenditure of money than do their commercial counterparts. Solid marriages involve less expenditure for counseling and divorce. Thus they are threats to the economy as portrayed in the GDP. By that standard, the best kids are the ones who eat the most junk food and exercise the least, because they will run up the biggest medical bills for obesity and diabetes.

Numbers Racket Why our economy is worse than we know:

...since the 1960s, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past twenty-five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed.

Plenty of Clinton era bashing in the above article for my friends of a more Republican shade.

Hell Hath No Limits: Wendell Berry and our Faustian Economics

Oh Wendell Berry, will you marry me?

From Harper's Magazine, Wendell Berry's Faustian Economics

The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such "biofuels" as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that "science will find an answer." The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

This belief was always indefensible - the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed - and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are "free" to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens.

Berry touches precisely on what is most scary to me in our national discourse, the complete lack of any talk of saving, conserving, just simply using less crap.

Isn't that the first best step to addressing out of control debt, spending, and energy costs? Just by saving and using less?

Christopher Hitchens Has Himself Waterboarded

Hitchens on Being Waterboarded

Video of Hitchens Actually Being Waterboarded

There's something almost giggle inspiring about the idea of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded, until you read the accompanying article and watch the video. And then its deadly serious. Hitchens, who had previously rejected waterboarding as torture, accepted a challenge from Vanity Fair to be waterboarded himself. After the experience he more or less repudiates his stance on the practice, although without quite going the distance and condemning America's use of torture completely and unequivocally.

The article itself is alternately frustrating and encouraging. Encouraging that a proponent of waterboarding can have his mind changed so thoroughly. Frustrating because do you really need to be waterboarded yourself to decide that its torture? What kind of insane arrogance and failure of imagination does it take to pretend that being systematically drowned by captors does not constitute torture until its actually done to you?*

However, if this is what it takes I'll gladly volunteer to perform "enhanced interrogation" on any number of right wing media pundits until they agree that torture is torture, that it is an immoral practice, that it violates treaties that the US belongs to, and if they will join their voices to the international calls for the US to stop torturing her prisoners of war.

*This lack of imagination and arrogance seems to be the a priori of many right wing talking points:
"I've never experienced prejudice, so racism doesn't really exist."
"I worked my way into fabulous wealth, I can't imagine any set of circumstance that would prevent every US citizen from being fabulously wealthy just like me. It just takes work."
"I can afford insurance, why can't you? All it takes is budgeting."

Monday Jam: Robert Pollard - Western Centipede

I'm no music critic, I know what I like and what I don't like, but I don't have a lot of reason for either of them. Mostly I like music that "kicks me in the balls" whatever that means. It means a lot to me, but probably means very little to you.

For better or worse a lot of what I like is aggressive "indie rock." Again, whatever that means, and coming of age in the 90s "Indie Rock" meant Guided by Voices and their sundry side projects.

And here is a deep track off of Robert Pollard's latest effort Robert Pollard is Off to Business:

Western Centipede

Hear Me, Lift Me, Love Me

Happy 30th Birthday to my beautiful wife, and favoritest person in the world.

Happy B-Day Julia.

Monday Jam: Standells - Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White

I'm feeling ornery, and blue collar, and class war-ish so here's a nice litte blue collar/class war anthem for you.

Good Guys Don't Wear White

I know I'm a bit behind on posts, and I've got some real goodies lined up, but first I have to clear the decks of some other work.

Hellboy Animated Comic

Apple has an animated comic up promoting the new Hellboy and the Golden Army movie. It's worth checking out for you Hellboy fans.

Hellboy Animated Comic Teaser