Re-booty

More thoughts on oil and cars. It may be time to restore the system to an earlier date. And why is it that we always have to feel the pain of mega-industries?

Barack Obama rode to power on a car running on green fuel and with gasoline becoming more expensive than milk. And so his message of energy savings and independence did find receptive ears, obviously. By November 4, the shock of $145 plus per barrel of oil was still reverberating in the bones of the car-addicted, even while the sinking economy was beginning to drag down energy prices as well. Within a week of launching his presidency, Obama already put the issue on the table as an early priority. And it makes sense, given that the Big Three failed miserably to devise sustainable strategies in the past and now their gradual demise may well squeeze the entire supplier industry. So what did President Obama have to say?

"We will commit ourselves to steady, focused, pragmatic pursuit of an America
that is freed from our energy dependence, and empowered by a new energy economy
that puts millions of our citizens to work. … Now is the time to meet the
challenge of this crossroads of history, by choosing a future safer for our
country, prosperous for our planet, and sustainable."

Turn up the volume
The reaction from the auto industry was predictable. As David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) told the New York Times: “It would have a devastating effect on everybody, and not just the domestics.” The auto industry has always, consistently and vociferously resisted changing its polluting and gas-guzzling ways for decades and decades. And they have done so by spending vast amounts of money on lobbyists (such as the CAR) that would have been better spent developing new technology. But the bucks were rolling in, and a vast nation of sheep was out there purchasing those ridiculous SUVs blithely ignoring the plain fact that the stuff running their car was coming from foreign soil and was not doing the atmosphere any good. In fact, a whole lobby was created to explain that pollution doesn't exist nor has it an effect on people and the environment. Well, that will sell to people who are willing to believe that dinosaurs stalked the earth with humans 6000 years ago.

The issue of energy dependence or independence is hardly a new one. But in a world in which anyone over 50 is considered a rusting hulk at the bottom of the ocean, and most young people clamp their brains between ear buds that blast them full of commercial thumping, a certain transfer of data has gone missing. Thirty-one years ago, then President Carter had this to say at his State of the Union Address:

“Never again should we neglect a growing crisis like the shortage of energy,
where further delay will only lead to more harsh and painful solutions…. Now we
know what we must do, increase production. We must cut down on waste. And we
must use more of those fuels which are plentiful and more permanent. We must be
fair to people, and we must not disrupt our Nation's economy and our budget.”

The path of least resistance
Then came Whitewash Reagan and suddenly Carter’s good intentions went out the window, alas. In the Happy Days mode, Americans felt it was OK to "move on" and live for the day, buying any car they liked, any car that Detroit wanted to foist upon them. Thus, every Tom, Dick and Jane with an inferiority complex could buy some huge device made for chasing terrorists in the desert and ride from home to the general store, shop and never witch off their engine. Anyone suggesting that this was absurd, that pollution was a real danger, that such vehicles were unnecessary or, heaven forbid, more money should be invested in public transportation, was laughed off the map or even called a Commie or Socialist. The latter two buzzwords, by the way, are always pulled out of the hat when someone feels humungous profits threatened, or some redneck is trying to sound smart. Most would not even recognize Communism if it came out of the corn syrup dispenser at House of Pancakes. Let's face it.

The price of oil was so cheap that innovation could no longer be marketed properly. That was the message from the scientific community, at any rate. At the Research Institutes in Garching, some scientists had found a very effective method to recycle heat using heat pumps and a silicate. But with oil at $12 or so a barrel, no way to get the system into the market where it belonged.

1+1=3
Indeed, in the 30 years between the oil shocks of the 70s and now, the entire world has changed. There can be no doubt that given the right leadership, human endeavor would have easily found a viable alternative to the internal combustion engine (the research was being done, there is no doubt, but it was kept away from the public, since the old system was working so well). But for that, it would have taken real leaders in power, not industry shills and professional deskmen with deep pockets like the class of pol that has risen to the top. Because the problem is not just in the USA. The German and French auto industries also jumped on the gas-guzzle bandwagon and hollered foul each time it was asked to mend its ways. The ADAC, Germany’s automobile club, has consistently lobbied against any regulation, for example. And the CAR equivalent in Germany, the VDA, has done nothing but put on the brakes. In the 70s, attempts were made to limit speeds on German highways, which are to this day the last bastion of official motoring hooliganism in Europe (barring country roads in places like Croatia, Hungary and Serbia, where the momma’s boys are also plentiful and need to counteract their inherent anger by driving big cars and stepping on the gas). These attempts were reversed by the groundswell of conservatism that swept the nation as of 1983. What a shame. By now, we would be used to going slower.

So we have to reboot to a different time, to an era in which we had a chance, like the 1970s. And the industry will squeak. It is doing so already. At an environmental forum in July in Magedeburg, Germany, hosted by Daimler, among others, all the lobbyists were present, sweating away for their masters, pleading to let the free market do its magic. The time may have come to let them grovel and plead. The last time we gave in to them, they ran off with the cash register and trashed the place.

(More to come on this topic, of course… so stay posted)

The Man in the Mirror

A new year's comment...

The short version is: Good riddance, George W. You were the worst of a series of presidents, and let us not forget that you are also whooped up by a vast majority of the American people for quite a while. But many saw the light. The question is: has that changed anything, especially now that GWB is on his way out. Looking at George W. Bush requires a look at the past 30 years, and more. Without at least a cursory glance at these years from a historical perspective, an unabashed look at the forest rather than the trees and twigs, it is impossible to actually comprehend what has happened to our society and how things have changed. The material here should be the skeleton for a book, so please forgive the length.

In a few days, President George W. Bush will be slinking out of the White House, perhaps with a few more platitudes in mangled English slipping from that mouth of his, which appears so strangely disconnected from his brain. Many people have a right to be profoundly angry at this man. He is essentially a provincial oaf, a slacker of the first water, a boring, untalented fellow who might have made a good soda jerk or something. Instead, he decided to project himself onto the public scene, where he consistently avoided the hard work, and in the end, it brought him down and the country went with him. And pretty much the world economy, world peace and social justice. Rightly, he may claim mission accomplished, since for all intents and purposes, that was the mission.

When he was selected by the Supreme Court in 2000, I and several friends in Germany discussed the results. Many said “Oh, he acts the dumbbell to get votes.” I contended, however, that the man was actually as clueless as he sounded and would become a disastrous president. I compared him to a wedding guest arriving late at the wrong wedding. Strange how that ultimately happened. From Katrina to AIG, GWB and his cronies were either late or currently unavailable. Most people in the USA by now, except the wholly owned robots of Rove Inc., realize that the invasion of Iraq was a terrific error. (Though for the purpose of the neo-cons, it was perfectly logical, because getting out of there is not as simple as many would hope, thus the USA is now in a sort of permanent war). Whatever, it was obvious that this man had neither scruples, nor real courage, nor knowledge, nor culture of any kind. In a word, he lacked anything vaguely resembling leadership qualities. But apparently, for many Americans, acting like an inebriated brawler is being a good leader. Well, now we are all in the sawdust, thank you.

Tough luck
Whoever his successor might have been, his or her hands would have been tied. And Obama’s are. He will have to accept humungous debt, he will be presiding over rising unemployment, a depressed planet and a world in which fuses have been lit all over the place and the arsonist is now heading back to a big home to do some occupational therapy in the garden. Unless really lucky, he will have little time or energy to implement any progressive policies that would have made the USA a contender in the 21st century. The neocons, who always reviled Franklin Delano Roosevelt, have in fact succeeded in turning back the clock to pre-FDR days, to a certain extent. Unions are in disarray, people are loosing their homes, their jobs, their wealth, everything they worked for, but America’s oligarchs, like the Bushes, remain firmly in the saddle. Many rights no longer exist, in fact, the sacred Constitution has even been seriously tampered with (see the Military Commissions Act, 2006). The Second Amendment was spared, because for some reason, the card-carrying members of the NRA believe firmly that all other amendments are irrelevant to freedom, if any Tom Dick and Harry cannot get a gun day or night, liberty is in serious jeopardy.


Is the current situation the fault of George Bush? Saying so would be tantamount to making the same mistake as Bush himself, who, when he could not blame failures on mysterious liberals, invisible terrorists, the Senate, the Clintons, his dog perhaps, was out there blaming god. Frank Rich recently covered Bush’s inability to take responsibility rather well. This blamestorming was performed by the entire GOP, however. William Kristol – whose columns in the New York Times read the way a frozen weathervane might read the wind direction – is a prime example of the kind of shallow thinking and ideological imbecility that has plagued the party and ultimately the nation for the past 40 years. He has been wrong on so many counts, it's amazing he gets published at all. These characters, from ideologue-in chief Rove to the vociferous and opportunistic minions off on the lunatic fringe of the mediasphere (Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Boortz, Hannity, etc…), have blamed everyone and everything for the failures of their own ideology for a generation now. Whereby their rantings are nothing new, radio and TV just gave them a bigger mouthpiece. The Web is a little more difficult a marketplace.

Clearing the air
But there are other contributors to this industrial-size snafu, and in a democratic system, they must also shoulder the blame. Let us begin with the opposition. Or rather the lack of one. Reagan, at least, had speaker of the house Tip O'Neil, an articulate and vociferous pol from way back, who had little fear of attacking the President's idiotic views. Nancy Pelosi is certainly no worthy successor: She had ample opportunity for impeaching Bush and Cheney, whose outrageous acceptance of torture and dismantling of the Constitution were far more impeachable than Clinton's hormonal excursion. How the opposition in the USA got browbeaten into submission is a lesson in human cowardice. No American today can ever question how the Nazis did it in the early 1930s in Germany, since they had physical violence as a threat.

Let us not forget the much reviled “liberal” media, too, which is at fault for everything that happens in the US that is not to someone’s liking. The big newspapers, from the NYT to the Washington Post, have essentially shilled for the right wing by letting themselves be terrorized without even seeing the shadow of a raised billy club. In Nazi Germany, to use a favorite comparison, there were real and present threats made and carried out against journalists and the intelligentsia. In the USA, none of that happened, the watchdogs curled up in the lap of mister "Josef" Rove and his predecessors. Bush was never called on his errors, after 9/11, there was no public outcry as to why the country was so unprepared. Michael Moore was lambasted for his Fahrenheit 911, rather than those who created the situation. That would be tantamount to lambasting Picasso for Guernica, while cooing to Göring.

The power of the advertising buck took over and the complete lack of media curiosity did the rest. The Iraq adventure was pretty much cheered along as if it were a football game. CNN couldn't get enough of it, it translated as ratings. The growing horde of ultra-rich ne’er do wells, who made their cash without creating a single job, essentially, were given kudos and long articles, they became the Magic Experts on Breaking the Secrets of this Never-Ending Financial Growth. And the masses applauded and chanted “more, more, more.” Anyone suggesting that this was the biggest bubble around was castigated as negative, Euro-trashy, treehugging, or even “leftist,” America’s favorite political insult since about 1871. It’s the same system that somehow infused millions of American with a bug that compelled them to purchase bloated vehicles that were poorly built and guzzled gas the way one of those 1950s machines did.

George Bush is the symptom
No, Virginia, there is no bogeyman. When looking in the mirror, you are looking at him. George Bush is a monstrous, banal character, who has the death of thousands and thousands on his born-again hands, and who simply sat by while everything around him burned, but he did not bring this situation about, he just did a bit of midwivery. He does not even have the conceptual powers to do anything more than watch TV and choke on pretzels. For the roots of the current problem, we can start with this news: On January 3, the Washington Post reported that industrial output was at its lowest rate in 28 years. (In an earlier post I did mention that the papers are really good at reporting the obvious…). In other words since the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan, the neo-conservative Saint-in-Chief. Most of the madness that dominates American financial and foreign policy today can be traced right back to him and his handlers (and McCarthy before them, but we need a cut-off point somewhere). He promoted the “business of business is business” mentality, and set America’s corporations loose on the country and the world. He maniacally slashed environmental laws, poured acid on our social system, busted unions and pumped huge and wasteful sums into the military. Suddenly, in the USA, being poor and needing a food stamp became a sin, whereas charging the US taxpayer $7000 dollars for a toilet seat on a brand new aircraft carrier became an easily forgivable bookkeeping error. After all, were people like Schulz and Weinberger not involved in the defense industry before taking over the henhouses? And there were diodes costing many hundred dollars, inordinately expensive hammers, and so on. The Reagan "Revolution" began with an extremely vicious and probably unnecessary economic explosion, high interest rates put millions out of work (but who cares), organized labour was, of course, squeezed, the military received a blank check. And yet, in 1984, you could still find unemployed autoworkers who were literally eating catfood to sustain their families voting for Reagan.

Some people love the boot that kicks them.

Meanwhile, education, welfare, working conditions and the environment lurched along as best they could considering the neo-con hazing. Under Reagan’s “Happy Times Are Here Again” reign, it was forbidden to remind folks that ideas of Our Big Leader were out of date and out of touch, that gas-guzzling had been discredited in 1973 and 1978. This was the era that led to the rise of such stupendously venal and bitter little men as Jack Welch, known as Neutron Jack, or, better yet Jurassic Jack™ (Business Guide, Basel, 2008). His solution to successful business was to terrorize employees by making sure that they never know whether or not they have a job, to use and abuse the environment and then move on leaving the locals to clean up the mess and deal with the unemployed families. Just like Anthony Comstock represented the vicious, anti-liberty parochialism of the early 20th century, Welch represents today the brutal carpetbagging industrialism of 19th-century America. Yes, it’s all cloaked in almost new-age terms, it all appears in comfortable sound bytes that people can easily remember, but it is no less violent, exploitative and unsustainable, i.e. thought out for the short term.

Let me digress here for a moment: One great example of Reagan’s response to criticism was the Teacher in Space Program, launched in August 1984 after the Democrats rightfully criticized Reagan’s policies on education. In fact, the country still needs a major reform of its educational system, but that's another page. In that gooey, avuncular, way, he announced that the country would send a teacher into space, that’s how serious he was about education (I was a radio announcer at the time and had to listen to such unbelievable drivel; worse yet, I had to see the idea praised in the press). Teacher number one was Terry McAuliffe, and she went up in the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle, and that should have served as the metaphor for any GOP attempt at repairing the US educational system…. The media mourned with the country, Reagan bowed his head and uttered shibboleths.

Give us this day our daily bomb
Reagan represented the worst of American culture and George W. Bush its culmination until now. Alas, Clinton was just the Democrat version of the same…. It’s a culture that canonizes brevity not for the sake of quick communication, but rather because everyone constantly has to “move on” and “get over it.” Those are the self-serving buzzwords in a society that no longer has time – or is given time – to reflect at little more, to find long-term solutions, to consider impact. Nor does it wish to sit back for a moment and figure out where things really went wrong. Finding a culprit is done quickly – the media, the Moslems, the liberals, the neo-cons, if need be. So you can bomb Lybia one day and move on the next, so Americans can invade a country, Grenada or Iraq, and then say: Get over it. That was the message of Ronald Reagan: Don’t Worry, Be Happy, Spend, Consume, Exploit and let us bomb happily.

In the 1980 election, Carter was left holding the Old Maid: inflation, due in great part to the oil shocks, and the hostage crisis. Plus a nation that refused to accept its defeat in Vietnam and the fact that it had gone so badly off-track. Watergate was to a certain degree a triumph, so why was the country so downtrodden? Conservatives were a bitter bunch, and the hippy folk, as they grew older, also showed some of their Blut und Boden nationalism and they, too, went for Reagan.

Revising Carter
But Carter was in fact a man with lots of hope, and his basic ideas were very progressive and good. Who spoke of independence of foreign oil first? He did. A brief tour of his presidency will reveal that he rightly saw that energy-savings were necessary and that we had to look at alternatives. He understood the notion of thrift, as opposed to his Republican successors who felt that shoveling money out the window and into the yards of the richest of the rich was somehow a way to spread the wealth. Well it isn’t, because the wealthy -- or obscenely rich -- tend to want more, more, more, and then power, power, power. Above all, Carter wanted to use America's considerable influence to bring about lasting peace in the Middle East and even came close to it by twisting the arms of Sadat and Begin… He lost the election to Reagan for two main reasons. First rhetorically, he spoke of the country having a “malaise,” which was true, but it put him at the mercy of the bogus GOP message of Happy Days. Secondly, Carter struggled with the hostage situation in Iran – a situation whose roots could be found in the coup against Mossadegh organized by the British and the Americans in 1953. The Anglo man in power was the Shah, a narrow-minded, reactionary satrap, who ran the country through his brutal police, the SAVAK and destroyed its economy in the process. The connection might be a little simplistic, but propaganda is simplistic as well: Is it any wonder the Iranians hated the American? But Israel, back then, kept supplying Iran in spite of an embargo, the Republicans entertained good relations with the Islamic Revolution through Menachem Begin, as Robert Parry mentions in a recent article. And Reagan earned his halo when the famous hostages were released on inauguration day. What staging, coup de theatre, stuff worthy of Hollywood… Irony? Or was it intent. The rest is history. But no one needs to be surprised that there is still no peace in the Middle East over 28 years after Camp David. George W. Bush continued the policy of standing behind Israel right or wrong and the ultimate outcome will be a disaster.

The buck stops there
They have all lived by the bugaboo. Reagan had the USSR and the ubiquitous communists, never mind that the US continued backing monstrous regimes or even creating such creatures as the drug-running Contras. The neo-cons were already then working on creating the Muslim bugaboo with Ghaddafi as the Evil Monster. The propaganda was so bad – and the media lapped it up so easily – that in one survey, 60% of respondents believed firmly that the dominating religion in Nicaragua was Islam… That’s because Nicaragua – an impoverished nation of 2.5 million campesinos that had just shaken of a fascist dictator – was deemed to be a major enemy of the USA. And so the US government decided that that little country hadn’t suffered enough…

The history is known, albeit forgotten. Iran-Contra, the Gulf War 1, the permanent bombing of Iraq during the 90s, the bombing of Serbia, invasion of Panama, and now Iraq… Bit by bit, American foreign policy began to look more and more violent and dimwitted. It’s main strategy was to create an enemy and then attack it. It was all manufactured stuff, cast in some ideological pressure-cookers, given some vague literary back-up from Hollywood (e.g. those idiotic muscle films, with steroidal goons flitting about the screen killing incompetent bad guys). The precipitate turned out to be Bush the Lesser. Incredibly, the media let him get away with it. But the media are craven, barricaded in their little towers, worried, worried, worried of shaking the trees of the powers that be... The result, a drum-fire of dumbing-down and isolationism that makes the nation almost impossible to deal with today.

Bush is going, but the neo-con mindset is not. The damage this ideology has caused cannot even be measured in dollars and cents or Euros. It is mental, spiritual, it is universal, it pervades every corner of our lives. Like AIDS, it has entered the very DNA of our society, making us all confuse rights and privileges, needs and wants. We have become greedy, self-absorbed, narcissistic, unimaginative, while others have simply become even richer and more powerful. Our earth has been raped, resources are being stolen and then resold to us at inflated prices. Money has flattened out the world. Everything has become acceptable, palatable, except for true emotion, sexuality, creativity, individualism. The Puritan ideal of a downtrodden society…. Ultimately, almost worse than the clerico-aristocracies those scurvied pure believers escaped from. Today the lone wolf would be ignored out of existence. The wars in Iraq, in Gaza, Congo, wherever: just entertaining events, from which people report using MMS, so that we can say “Wow!” Nothing is real. People have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook, Xing, MySpace and other reflecting surfaces as devastating as Narcissus’s pond, but out in the streets, we stare at the miniature screens of our mobile phones for comforting messages, we allow multinationals to pump commercial music into our ears through ear buds that block off all communication with our neighbor on the train. What an unbelievable illusion, and yet, millions believe it. Millions and millions and millions.

Reading a vigorous critique of our society like Curtis White’s The Middle Mind, is like communing with the wild folk in Brave New World. Society is so flat and bland and opportunistic, that it simply ignores those who try and shake things up (justifiably). Depressing scenes are all those young people eating at McDonalds, even young people who have just finished demonstrating against the G8 or the World Bank, or are worried about their professional futures (MacDonald’s evil is not only the lousy food, it’s also the labor system it has created using 100% replaceable humanoids). And so our societies accept such horribly banal, venal, incompetent, vain, conventional politicians, men and often women without vision, without compassion, only interested in maintaining a status quo that is in effect feudal, with the Untouchable Monopolies like Microsoft on one side and the rest of us grovelers on the other. The bosses – like Sarkozy, Bush, Berlusconi, Brown, even Merkel in Germany, I am afraid, and so on – are incapable of taking responsibility and setting a good example. Obama hasn’t yet proved himself, but until now his cabinet choices have not been what one might call brilliant, innovative, visionary.

That task remains for common mortals to do. One suggestion would be to return to the activism of the 1970s and to avoid being co-opted by power and powers. If “normal” humans (not the feudal lords of the 21st century) do not learn to become active and creative again, whatever freedoms we have battled for over centuries of bloody battles will be taken away. It can be done, step one is welcoming your neighbor as a friend, oddly enough, getting together, singing songs, making music, dancing at home. Throwing the TV on the trash heap and paying attention not to become swallowed up and addicted to anything run by a huge and anonymous corporation. There is a way, as long as we can still hear another person's heart beating. That is a prayer.