From the cartoon strip “Pickles” today, quoting Orwell:

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

That’s something to ponder as we look around and see the devastation wrought by undoing of Depression-era banking regulations by Clinton and Bush.

What do Jane Hamsher, (Firedoglake.com), Glenn Greenwald and Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) have in common? They are supporting the Accountability Now Political Action Committee, which has set out to recruit liberal Democratic candidates to run primary contests against seats currently held by so-called “moderate” Democrats – those who often support Republican policies and oddly, when stripped of party designation, seem like Republicans. Accountability Now is also supported by MoveOn.org.

Read more about it here.

Predictably, the Democratic leadership is not happy about this. Says Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,

What I’ve been warning people very clearly is, beware of forming a circular firing squad. We people should be focusing their efforts on expanding the Democratic majority, and that should be their singular focus.

Asked what was the point of electing Democrats who support Republican policies, Van Hollen said “That’s the whole point. Both parties dislike liberals. Always have.”

OK, I made that up, but it is my suspicion. Here’s his eminence, Harry Reid:

It’s not helpful to me. It’s not helpful to the Democratic Caucus.

Asked why having more liberals in congress would not be helpful to the Democratic Caucus, Reid said “They interfere with my objectives. I have a job to do – I have to promote an agenda completely at odds with my supporters while at the same time having to appear to be in harmony with them. It’s hard enough without having to deal with real liberals.”

OK. I made that up too.

It’s a good thing they are doing. I’ve long said that liberals don’t get what they want because they are too easy. They cave to the Democrats like a the class nerd to the homecoming queen. If having Democrats in congress is important for its own sake, and not to advance an agenda, then the two-party system is a sham.

By the way, it is, pretty much.

It was a sad day last Thursday for the states of Washington and Montana, as all four Democratic senators representing these two states sided with Republicans to lower the estate tax. Senators Maria Cantwell, Patty Murray, Max Baucus and Jon Tester all jointed with Republicans in voting to extend current estate tax levels into the foreseeable future. Its a wee bit confusing, as there is a “deficit-neutral” provision that would actually increase the estate tax exemption to $10 million. Let’s just say that Congress is looking at the re-emergence of the old estate tax at 2001 levels with trepidation.

The estate tax is a deceitful issue, but one very demonstrative of how politics is done in the United States. It affects only the top 2/10th’s of one percent (.002) of all taxpayers. These would be our wealthiest families and their heirs – the Walton’s, Harriman’s, Kennedy’s and Bush’s. Yet when politicians talk about it publicly, they frame it in terms of dirt farmers and cattle ranchers, who are mostly unaffected. Further, conservatives ran the tax through the public relations industry, and were instructed never to use the expression “estate tax”, but rather the “death tax”, giving it an ominous aura.

The vote on Thursday will be a costly one – a tax cut of $245 billion for our wealthiest, bringing the total cost of estate tax cuts since Bush took office to over $700 billion. This at a time when so many working and middle class people are suffering. Baucus and Tester have screwed up priorities, it seems.

Why an estate tax? It goes back to the Progressive Era. During the late 19th century, for the first time in our history and coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. saw its ranks of extremely wealthy families grow – the Rockefellers, Mellons, DuPonts and others left a bad taste on the public palate. Based on our experience in Great Britain, a country still run by its wealthiest families through the House of Lords, our forebears thought it wise to break up large estates. Nothing good comes from large concentrations of wealth save undue power and influence, bought politicians and privileged citizens enjoying special influence over public officials – the opposite of democracy.

In other words, untaxed estates lead to rule by the Walton heirs – oligarchy, or plutocracy, to be precise. We have legislators bending over (backwards) for the sake of the top 1%.

In Montana in 2006, 92 estates paid estate taxes – about 1.1% of all estates that year. But these are the wealthiest people in the state, and Senators Baucus and Tester seem very aware of them. One of the wealthiest families in the state is the Rehberg family. Congressman Rehberg ought to recuse himself from estate tax votes, as he is voting dollars into his own pocket. Rehberg has been one of the most vocal opponents of estate taxation – I suspect this has to do with his father’s estate having to pay the tax, and Denny’s inheritance being decreased. Hell hath no fury like a jilted trust baby. (Read here how Rehberg in 2005, true to form, speaks of the Estate Tax as affecting “families who have their whole lives invested in the farm or their small business”, rather than affecting him personally. It’s blatant – he’s shameless.)

But he’s got Senators Baucus and Tester fighting for him. So it’s a moot point.

Here’s something you don’t often see … justice. Ward Churchill won his court case. He was indeed fired for exercising his first amendment rights, says a jury.

That was obvious. He wrote an essay critical of U.S. foreign policy, calling 9/11 victims “little Eichman’s”. His point was that “if you make it a practice of killing other people’s babies for personal gain . . . eventually they’re going to give you a taste of the same thing.”

He was railroaded out of his job at the University of Colorado in Boulder. They didn’t specifically fire him for writing those words – instead they went on a witch hunt, looking for something, anything in his body of work that would offer a good hook to hang the firing on. They came up with plagiarism.

No, says the jury. You fired him for speaking his mind.

Churchill vindicated? This is America. That’s doesn’t happen often – savor the moment.

Montana Headlines, one of the more thoughtful blogs, has not been posting for quite a while. I hope he’s just busy and that he gets back in the game. As Steve demonstrates below in post #1000, blogging is vewy, vewy important.

Headlines last two entries are off-kilter, coming as they do from a man of considerable depth. He offers praise to Sarah Palin, but is less impressed with Ayn Rand. There could not be a more stark juxtaposition – a deep and thoughtful woman whose philosophical meanderings might possibly have changed the world for the worse, and Ayn Rand.

First, Palin:

The question, rather, is whether Gov. Palin is the right person to spearhead the GOP’s comeback 4 to 8 years from now. We must confess that since we are so steeped in the conservative movement’s not inconsiderable intellectual heritage, our main question about Gov. Palin is whether she has the intellectual chops to make it happen. We unreservedly reject the condescending, haughty put-downs directed at her from her betters (after all, we heard the same sort of panicked attacks about Goldwater, Reagan, Thatcher, and Gingrich during their ascendencies, all of whom had intellectual chops far exceeding what they were then given credit for.)

But saying that the caricatures of elitist snobs (or of that even lower form of life, the elitist snob manqué) are grossly unfair is not quite the same thing as saying that Gov. Palin should be handed the Goldwater/Reagan/Thatcher/Gingrich mantle, post-haste.

In this vein, one of our favorite conservative writers, John O’Sullivan, has written a nice piece in which he comes to her defense:

Inevitably, Lloyd Bentsen’s famous put-down of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate is resurrected, such as by Paul Waugh (in the London Evening Standard) and Marie Cocco (in the Washington Post): “Newsflash! Governor, You’re No Maggie Thatcher,” sneered Mr. Waugh. Added Ms. Coco, “now we know Sarah Palin is no Margaret Thatcher — and no Dan Quayle either!”

Jolly, rib-tickling stuff. But, as it happens, I know Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is a friend of mine. And as a matter of fact, Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have a great deal in common.

It’s a trick! Don’t fall for it. The comparison is apt, but not in the way Headlines imagines. Margaret Thatcher brought Reaganism to Great Britain, and the presumption on the right is, just as with Reagan, that she is indisputably a great leader. But she was not. She surely had an adequate mind and a strong sense of purpose, but she also led Britain down the road we are now on in the U.S. … collapse. Unregulated capitalism always brings about collapse – that she could not see this is her own blind spot. That Reagan could not see it was part of an overall intellectual deficit that Thatcher had spotted when she said of him:

Poor dear, there’s nothing between his ears.

To bring Sarah Palin into this mix is both appropriate, in the Reagan sense, and inappropriate in the Thatcher sense. Any fool can plainly see that Palin is a second-rate intellect, perhaps third-rate. She ought to be an embarrassment to Republicans, but instead some of them are touting her for president. That’s comical.

Just one example of Palin’s qualifications: it’s part of a policy speech she gave on October 24, 2008:

Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You’ve heard about some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Fruit flies are used by scientists to help them understand, and maybe fix, human disorders like autism and other disabilities. Sarah, who wants to be president, doesn’t get this. I kid you not.

Concerning Rand, Headlines is a little more circumspect. There’s a rift between conservatives, libertarians and objectivists, though the overlap in their philosophies is probably over 90%. All three are immutably opposed to government intervention in society beyond a few basic functions, like military defense and courts. All see failure in systems all around them, and blame government. All are blind to the unworkability of unrestrained capitalism.

Here’s Headlines on Rand:

Traditional conservatism has a mixed relationship with Rand. On the one hand, her novels cut to the heart of socialism, collectivism, and government regulation in their various forms in a way that is readable and indeed gripping. A page-turner like Atlas Shrugged probably did more than the writings of a dozen prominent economists ever could, creating a healthy suspicion of “managed” economies and helping ordinary readers to understand the inextricable connection between the loss of economic liberty and the loss of all liberties.

Think of them as being similar to the recent, grittier movie adaptations of super-hero comic books such as the (quite impressive) Christian Bale Batman movies.

On the other hand, her hostility to traditional religion and her lack of any respect for tradition in general caused most thoughtful conservative thinkers, in the end, to reject her ideas as being just as flawed and potentially dangerous as were the communist and socialist ideologies she was mercilessly flaying in her writings.

That’s astute, except for the “page-turner” part. Rand was as hostile to religion as she was to non-smokers, and in fact was in total contempt of humanity. The cardboard characters she constructed in Atlas Shrugged were robots, purely analytical about even our frail emotions and romantic love. Her economic system was as devoid of color as her perverted love life. She constructed an Alice-in-Wonderland system of trickle-down benefits for the unworthy, provided by a few good men. It has as much bearing on how our system really works, how we really live and love, as Scientology.

Headlines seems to think the rift between conservatives and objectivists is merely about contempt for religion. He seems to be with her all the way on her off-the-wall economic system. I hope it is not so. I hope that Rand is soon relegated to the dust bin of failed philosophies, along with Mr. Marx.

And I hope he soon understands that Sarah Palin has not read AtlasShrugged, never will, and not much else either, and that she has far more in common with Ronald Reagan than Maggie Thatcher.

Here’s a cute little web site that practices the art of reducing life’s complexities down to mathematical formulas. A few examples:

PONZI SCHEME = ROI – R – I

CRAZY = TALKING TO ONESELF – (CELL PHONE + EAR PIECE)

BRUNCH = BREAKFAST + LUNCH + CANTALOUPE

DOGGIE DAYCARE = KENNEL – GUILT

You get the idea.

Here’s a blog piece by Paul Krugman that analyzes the financial policy of the Obama Administration, captive as it is of Wall Street. He claims that Obama is basically trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again – that is, securitization failed to spread risk, but instead intensified it. Now they want ot go back, pick up the pieces, and try securitization of risk, one more time.

Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and puréed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Subprime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans — all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process.

But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.

But if Wall Street has spent $5 billion over the last ten years to influence policy, Wall Street is pretty well going to get its way, and forget for a moment whether a “D” (45% of contributions) or an “R” (55%) is in power, because that person is not really in power anyway.

To be fair, officials are calling for more regulation. Indeed, on Thursday Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, laid out plans for enhanced regulation that would have been considered radical not long ago.

But the underlying vision remains that of a financial system more or less the same as it was two years ago, albeit somewhat tamed by new rules.

As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.

But try they will. Wall Street, I mean. Obama is merely a conduit, as McCain would have been. Two parties is nonsense. It’s one party – the capitalist party, with two right wings, one of which flaps harder than the other, meaning we go in circles.

But who knows the future? Well, one person does – here’s the tail end of a blog comment by Dave Budge at Electric City Web Log, 3/26/09 11:49am:

In other words, we’re screwed. The only thing that can save us is to reduce spending as a percentage of GDP. But for at least the next two years that ain’t gunna happen.

I think what he is saying there is that change is in store, two years down the road. Mid-terms. Restoration of financial sanity. ‘R’s (55% of $5 billion) take over from ‘D’s (45%), and we’ll have a change of course. Of course.

He’s also saying that the government should not be spending money like it is – in fact, many R’s are saying this – that we should be cutting spending, reducing tax rates for the wealthy once more – you know – all of these people who did not see this coming now know how to get us out of it. It’s pure insanity.

Here’s some more formulas:

Steve and I are going back and forth now on our upcoming post #1,000. This one is #996, so we get to do three more of no consequence, and then have to deliver profundity. I suggested that we do something on this TV phenomenon called The Hills, but Steve says it is “painfully shallow.”

Who knew? I presumed that pop culture would contain elements of self awareness and would embed a deeper message, perhaps satirizing our consumer-driven wealth-crazed existence.

Not so. It’s just a show. The actresses are simple, stupid, pretty people. Totally.

Here’s something interesting I learned from that: It turns out that beautiful people don’t have to work as hard for success as the rest of us, and so end up in professions like modeling and acting, where looks trump everything else. So people in those professions tend to be shallow.

But that makes me wonder – I like this TV show called “House”, but can’t help but notice that everyone involved in that show is stunning and beautiful. At our local hospital, nurses tend to be a little frumpy and stressed – the medical profession in general attracts people who work very hard. Pretty people can make a living without working hard. So most doctors and nurses are pretty ordinary looking.

Could it be that TV is peddling a fake bill of goods? Could it be that ordinary people lacking in extraordinary beauty and charm are worthy too? Could it be that Jennifer Aniston will never marry again, and that it will not matter? Could it be that Brad and Angelina are really just very shallow and self-absorbed people, so much so that they think their own public ‘caring’ for others is just another form a narcissism?

I’m leaving #1,000 to Steve. I’m out of ideas. I don’t know what is profound, what is shallow. I mean, if Brad Pitt is just another pretty boy, if George Clooney is not really a deep thinker, if Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon are just paper mache, then all I have left to guide my thoughts is Jon Stewart. And when I listen to him when he is not scripted, he doesn’t seem to know very much.

I am lost. Where to go for guidance? How to know what to think? I’m calling on Steve now to use post #1,000 to help me out. It will be a doozy – maybe the best blog post ever. No pressure.

Closing the Collapse Gap is a wry and wonderfully witty talk by Dmitry Orlav, an expatriate Russian living in America. Since it is a slide show/lecture from 2006, I am probably miles behind the curve. I just discovered him.

Orlav observes in 2006 that a collapse in the U.S. is inevitable, and will probably occur within the near future. He was prescient. But he’s not a pessimist by any means – just a sardonic observer with some useful experience for us as we stumble through it.

A few samples:

Many of the problems that sunk the Soviet Union are now endangering the United States as well. Such as a huge, well-equipped, very expensive military, with no clear mission, bogged down in fighting Muslim insurgents. Such as energy shortfalls linked to peaking oil production. Such as a persistently unfavorable trade balance, resulting in runaway foreign debt. Add to that a delusional self-image, an inflexible ideology, and an unresponsive political system.

Then there is our dependence on foreign oil – something that did not trouble the Soviets:

… [an] untenable arrangement rests on the notion that it is possible to perpetually borrow more and more money from abroad, to pay for more and more energy imports, while the price of these imports continues to double every few years. Free money with which to buy energy equals free energy, and free energy does not occur in nature. This must therefore be a transient condition. When the flow of energy snaps back toward equilibrium, much of the US economy will be forced to shut down.

Americans don’t like being compared to Russians, since we are exceptional people. But Orlav does the comparisons, and finds Americans coming up short in the survival of the fittest game. And then there is the American holiday season … We live miles apart for a reason. We don’t like each other.

When confronting hardship, people usually fall back on their families for support. The Soviet Union experienced chronic housing shortages, which often resulted in three generations living together under one roof. This didn’t make them happy, but at least they were used to each other. The usual expectation was that they would stick it out together, come what may.

In the United States, families tend to be atomized, spread out over several states. They sometimes have trouble tolerating each other when they come together for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, even during the best of times. They might find it difficult to get along, in bad times. There is already too much loneliness in this country, and I doubt that economic collapse will cure it.

Then there is our food system, with “organic” meat and vegetables shipped to various Whole Foods in refrigerated diesel trucks:

[Americans] don’t even bother to shop and just eat fast food. When people do cook, they rarely cook from scratch. This is all very unhealthy, and the effect on the nation’s girth, is visible, clear across the parking lot. A lot of the people, who just waddle to and from their cars, seem unprepared for what comes next. If they suddenly had to start living like the Russians, they would blow out their knees.

Perhaps the greatest efficiency of the Soviet Union was its incredible inefficiency. Things that benefit humans, like day care, paid vacations, pensions and health care, are not so conducive to “efficiency” as are fear of job loss, loss of home and savings.

A private sector solution is not impossible; just very, very unlikely. Certain Soviet state enterprises were basically states within states. They controlled what amounted to an entire economic system, and could go on even without the larger economy. They kept to this arrangement even after they were privatized. They drove Western management consultants mad, with their endless kindergartens, retirement homes, laundries, and free clinics. These weren’t part of their core competency, you see. They needed to divest and to streamline their operations. The Western management gurus overlooked the most important thing: the core competency of these enterprises lay in their ability to survive economic collapse. Maybe the young geniuses at Google can wrap their heads around this one, but I doubt that their stockholders will.

Then there is American “democracy” with our switches back and forth between two parties who are more alike than different. We can’t even get rid of the worst president in our short history for eight long years. That’s dysfunction junction.

Perestroika and Glasnost were all about democracy, and in my opinion it had the same chance of success as the hopelessly gerrymandered system that passes for democracy in the US, (although much less than any proper, modern democracy, in which the Bush regime would have been put out of power quite a while ago, after a simple parliamentary vote of no confidence and early elections). The problem is that, in a collapse scenario, democracy is the least effective system of government one can possibly think of (think Weimar, or the Russian Interim Government)…

Collapse is here, it seems. Are we prepared? My wife and I occupy a small patch of land, and use it to grow trees (currently being eaten by pine beetles) and flowers. Maybe we will convert it to a food coop. Maybe our neighbors will shoot us and steal it from us.

If you have a few minutes, read the whole talk. For me, it was rewarding and well-spent time.