Within the context of conventional party
politics - the kind that has been baseline
"normal" in the USA for a long time - we see
this playing out in two factions that are
increasingly out-of-touch with reality.  The
Obama government has made itself hostage to a
toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to
sustain the wish for "hope" - if not hope
itself - the President and his White House
advisors along with his cabinet appointments,
are pretending that the historical forces of
compressive contraction are not underway.
They're flat-out lying about the employment
figures issued in the government's name.
They're willfully ignoring the comprehensive
bankruptcy gripping government at all levels.
They refuse to bring the law to bear against
"the malefactors of great wealth." They appear
to not understand the epochal energy scarcity
problem the whole world faces, or its
implications for industrial economies. Most of
all, they persist in promoting the lie that
this economy can return to the prior state of
reckless debt accumulation (a.k.a
"consumerism") that has made us so ridiculous
and unhealthy.

  The trouble with self-delusion, either in a
person or a society, is that reality doesn't
care what anybody believes, or what story they
put out.  Reality doesn't "spin." Reality does
not have a self-image problem.  Reality does
not yield its workings to self-esteem
management. These days, Americans don't like
reality very much because it won't let them
push it around. Reality is an implacable force
and the only question for human beings in the
face of it is: what will you do?  In other
words, it's not really possible to manage
reality, but you can certainly choose to
manage your affairs within reality.  We won't
do that because it's too difficult. This harsh
situation leaves the public increasingly with
little more than bad feelings of
discouragement and persecution. It's
astonishing that all the smart people around
the president don't get this.

  Reality unfolds emergently, and this ought
to interest us.  For instance, I have
maintained for many years that we are
approaching the twilight of the automobile age
- and the implications of this for daily life
in the USA are pretty large. For a long time,
I had assumed that this change of
circumstances would proceed from our problems
with the oil supply.  But reality is sly.  It
has thrown two new plot twists into the story
lately. America's romance with cars may not
founder just on the fuel supply question.  It
now appears that our problems with capital are
so severe that far fewer people will be able
to borrow money from banks to buy cars at the
rate, and in the way, that the system has been
organized to depend on.  Our problems with
capital are also depriving us of the ability
to pay to fix the hypercomplex system of
county roads, interstate highways, and even
city streets that make motoring possible. What
will we do?


  For now, a cashless government gives out
cash-for-clunkers, which is basically a
self-esteem building program designed to make
the government feel better about itself
because it is ostensibly taking
11-miles-per-gallon cars off the road and
replacing them with 27-miles-per-gallon cars,
thus forestalling scary problems with climate
change. It's dumb of course, but the failure
of leadership is comprehensive. Even the elite
environmentalists at the Aspen Institute are
preoccupied with finding new "green" ways to
keep all the cars running.  They put zero
effort into the idea of walkable communities,
or restoring the railroad system, which will
be the reality-based remedies for the
car-dependency problem.

  The Republican right wing is, if anything,
even more childishly delusional. For Glen Beck
and Sarah Palin it comes down to "drill, baby,
drill."  They know nothing about the geology
of oil - they don't even believe that the
earth is more than six-thousand years old,
meaning they don't believe in geology, period
- but they are inflamed with the faith of
eight-year-old children that we must have a
lot more oil in the ground because this is
America and God loves us more than people in
other parts of the planet so it must be there.
As their disappointment mounts, their childish
ideas will turn cruel and sadistic. They'll
seek to punish anybody who believes that the
earth is more than six thousand years old. The
catch is, If they get into power in the
election cycles ahead, they'll be impotent and
ineffectual even at persecuting their
enemies. 

  In the meantime, American life will just
wind down, no matter what we believe.  It
won't wind down to a complete stop.  Its
near-term destination is to lower levels of
complexity and scale than what we've been used
to for a long time.  People will be able to
drive fewer cars fewer miles.  The roads will
get worse.  They'll be worse in some places
than others. There will be fewer jobs to go to
and fewer things sold. People who live in
communities scaled to the energy and capital
realities of the years ahead are liable to be
more comfortable. We're surely going to have
trouble with money. Households will drown in
debt and lose all their savings.  Money could
be scarce or worthless. Credit will be
scarcer.

  Both factions of American political life
indulge in the fiction of control. History is
reality's big brother.  It is taking us
someplace that we don't want to go, so it will
probably have to drag us there kicking and
screaming. For starters, both reality and
history will probably take us out to some
woodshed of the national soul and beat the
crap out of us.  That could be a salutary
thing, since the crap consists of all the lies
we tell ourselves. Once we're rid of all that,
we may rediscover a few things left inside our
collective identity that are worth regarding
with real self-respect.

More than two years before the 2012 Iowa
caucuses, presidential speculation should
come with a soothsayer's money-back
guarantee. But what all the discussions
of Palin's future miss is the way that
Republican Party rules are made-to-order
for a well-funded insurgent named Sarah
to sweep the primaries before anyone
figures out how to stop her. If Palin can
maintain, say, 35-percent support in a
multi-candidate presidential field, then
she is the odds-on favorite for the GOP
nomination.

The secret of Palin's presidential
potential is the Republican Party's
affection for winner-take-all primaries.
According to my friend Elaine Kamarck's
invaluable new book, Primary Politics, 43
percent of the 2008 Republican delegates
were selected in primaries where the
winner corralled all the delegates by
winning a state or congressional
district. As a result of the Republicans'
to-the-victor-go-the-spoils method of
picking convention delegates, Mike
Huckabee finished second in 16 states and
won a paltry 74 delegates for his trouble.

And then there is the challenge from Asia. The numbers
are small, but the trend is clear. Pharmaceutical
research--dominated by America today--is succumbing to
the same dynamics that drove T-shirt manufacturing and
electronics production overseas. "In 2006, 5.5 percent
of all global pharmaceutical patent applications named
one inventor or more located in India, and 8.4 percent
named one or more located in China," according to a
report by the Kauffman Foundation. This was a fourfold
increase from 1995, and corresponds to a surge in drug
demand in emerging markets--from 13 percent of global
industry sales growth in 2001 to 27 percent in 2006.

With the end of the Cold War, Americans stopped
worrying about the Soviet threat and, as a result, R&D
funding for applied science plummeted, dropping 40
percent in the 1990s. It has picked up since then, but
the government's share of overall R&D spending remains
near its all-time low. And while corporations still
spend on R&D, they do not fund the kind of basic
research that leads to breakthroughs.

America's decline is most evident in the one realm of
high technology where the U.S. government has, until
recently, seemed most uninterested: energy. The three
most important areas where current technology could
yield big results are solar, wind, and battery
production (the latter because the energy has to be
stored somewhere). According to the investment bank
Lazard Frères, the world's largest wind-turbine
manufacturer (by revenue) is a U.S. company: General
Electric. But the other nine companies among the top 10
are scattered around the world, including Germany
(Nordex), Denmark (Vestas), India (Suzlon), and Spain
(Acciona).

The situation in solar is similar: U.S. companies take
up two slots on the top-10 list (First Solar at No. 2,
and SunPower at No. 7), but Japan and China both occupy
three slots. What's more, Gary Pisano and Willy Shih,
professors at Harvard Business School, argue that
although the United States still produces about 14
percent of the world's photovoltaic cells, "it no
longer is a significant player in crystalline
silicon-based solar panels, the prevailing technology."

Eight of the world's top 10 battery manufacturers are
headquartered in Japan. Only one--Johnson Controls--is
based in the United States. (China's BYD is the other.)
The lithium-ion battery in the much-touted Chevy Volt
will be manufactured in South Korea. The next evolution
in battery technology is large-scale storage--the kind
that would hold the electricity generated by solar or
wind power so it can be put to use at night or when the
wind's not blowing. The leader in this area is also a
Japanese company, NGK Insulators, which makes highly
efficient sodium-sulfur ("molten salt") batteries.

1) Greatly reduce or entirely eliminate taxes on the
rich, thereby forcing hard-pressed working families to
painfully make up resulting revenue shortfalls.

2) Bust labor unions, cruelly preventing the collective
bargaining that's the key reason why US workers ever
won decent wages and benefits.

3) Stubbornly deny the existence of ominous climate
change while blithely pumping more pollutants into the
environment from lucrative, dirty industries and
practices. Although reputable scientists say 350 carbon
parts per atmospheric million is the safe limit for
sustained life on Earth, Republicans dismiss the
frightening fact that we're already at a carbon level
of roughly 390 ppm.

4) Remove "restrictive" regulations on everything from
investment banks and credit card companies to a broad
array of "profit-eroding" consumer protections, leaving
the American masses exposed to a host of resulting
abuses and dangers.

5) Continue to criticize and insufficiently fund public
education, advocating private schooling instead, thus
entirely ignoring that progressive public systems are
used in every country that has education outcomes
superior to our own.

6) Outlaw abortion, under a fraudulently moral guise,
compelling the US to bloodily join those benighted,
backward nations where thousands of already-born,
living, breathing, socially functioning females perish
because of sexist denials of their basic reproductive
rights.

7) Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last
six words are "with liberty and justice for all," while
remaining numbly oblivious to the harsh hypocrisy of
preventing our homosexual citizens from marrying.

8) Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in
secret wiretapping, repression of domestic dissent,
neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling,
and a panoply of Patriot Act transgressions against the
Constitution of the United States...all under the
misused rubric of "national security."

9) Show the rest of humankind nothing but bullying
world-cop arrogance through endless US interventions
and aggressions on foreign soil, resulting not just in
countless lives extinguished in indefensible wars, and
billions of badly-needed dollars flushed down the
drain, but constant al Qaeda recruitment against hated
Yankee interlopers.

10) Generally drive down the income levels of America's
working-class majority, as a purported cost-saving
corporate measure, without appreciating that a populace
that's too poor to buy back what society produces is
doomed to economic ruin. A living wage is the ultimate
"stimulus," but try to find even one Republican who
favors it!

11) Continue to lie about the alternative, affordable
health care for all that some fifty world nations'
people overwhelmingly support, thereby
propagandistically leading Americans to think that
having private insurance whose premiums are rising at
rates three times higher than our pay -- and which
routinely denies coverage when it's required most -- is
somehow preferable

12) Unleash de facto ethnic cleansing against 12
million immigrant men, women, and children, making them
contemporary equivalents of the Jewish scapegoats that
Hitler blamed for hardships Germans experienced during
a prior period of capitalist economic distress.

13) Shamefully try to lend credence to their avarice
and social irresponsibility by revising the Bible to
obscure passages that place human need before abject
greed, attempting to turn it into a facilitating guide
for modern peers of the temple moneychangers whose
tables Jesus angrily knocked to the floor (and who
undoubtedly wouldn't be mentioned in the amended
version that one conservative group is actually,
amazingly trying to put into circulation).

14) Give full vent to the intensely bigoted hatred that
has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing
Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals...if
only they could.

15) Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million
Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological
"purists" such as Sarah Palin.