Nevertheless there’s value — during these weeks when the Pakghanistan policy hangs in the balance — in his assessment of the President and the Pentagon.
When he compares Obama to his old friend Jack Kennedy, he shakes his head.
“He’s twice the intellectual that Jack was, but Jack knew the great world. Remember he spent a long time in the navy, losing ships. This kid [Obama] has never heard a gun fired in anger. He’s absolutely bowled over by generals, who tell him lies and he believes them.
He hasn’t done anything. … You have to go by what people tell you. He’s like that. He’s not ready for prime time and he’s getting a lot of prime time on his plate at once.”
Very much my worry during the interregnum last year, when it became clear that Obama would retain the Bush-Cheney Pentagon leadership in its entirety.
It’s been a slippery slope since the spring of 2008, when Obama, the apparent Democratic candidate, was briefed by the Apparat on Pakghanistan and (like McCain) responded, “Sure, anything you guys say.”
He might have said No then, rejecting the Briefers (which is hard to do and dangerous if done).
‘We’re getting out of Afghanistan if I’m elected!’ he might have told the crowds all summer. But it would have been harder to be elected. He chose to go along.
Next Opportunity: Post election. The best opportunity. And the way to seize it was to replace the uniformed leadership atop the Pentagon, perhaps retaining Gates as Secy of Defense.
Next Opportunity: The “thorough review” of the policy in January and February — out of which the President dashed cheerleading Petraeus’s Pakghanistan Surge like it was summertime 2008.
Even when Europe and NATO greeted the roadshow with lip service while setting Stausbourg aflame, the President would not be swayed from pledged loyalty.
As a result, 2009 has been the costliest year (in US lives) of the eight-year war.
NS Advisor James Jones, once a general, is against the Surge.
Secy of Defense Gates is not speaking in support of the Surge.
Former everything Colin Powell is agin it.
Joe Biden (whom I respect on foreign affairs and constitutional law) is agin it, even if he betrays Kennedy-like hope in focused “counterinsurgency” ops. Rahm Emanuel is agin it. And Biden has a lot of influential pals in the Senate agin it, starting with John Kerry atop the Foreign Relations committee.
The President should take Kerry’s words to heart, and then gird his loins like a wrestler:
“John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said after the meeting that “it would be irresponsible” to send more troops until it became clear “what is possible in Afghanistan.”
The Persians of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. Alexander the Great. The early modern Brits. The Soviet Union. Everybody knows what’s possible in Afghanistan. Desultory defeat.
No one has voiced in public a coherent War Aim. Neither the various forces labelled Taliban nor the meeting of minds labelled Al Qaeda can be defeated with guns. The War on Terror is a propaganda war. Trying to win it with guns enhances the enemy’s power.
Obama in his heart knows this. The Cairo speech and his September UN speech.
What he has lacked is precisely what Gore Vidal points to: The wherewithal to get from what he knows in his heart to an effective policy.
This is the last opportunity to get out without losing a second term. Surge another 40,000 troops, tell the Pentagon to Go Get’m, and the resultant gorey mess will leave the next election to Romney.
The dice have been rolling about the table for two weeks now. If the current debate ends in a decision to send more troops, then Obama has backed down and the future is clear.
If it ends otherwise, then a turn has been accomplished, and the future’s a mist.
Mist is the best the President can hope for at the moment, after endorsing for eighteen months an Aimless war.
Well. Ireland has voted 67-33 in a referendum to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, which would pretty much create a United States of Europe centrally governed by the EU apparatus in Brussels.
It seems to me a sad day, despite a recent half-apology for dem Bilderbergers.
Last year, of course, the Irish rejected the treaty/constituiton, drawing the ire of the continental powers. This time around, the Times story suggests, fear born of the current economic crisis and a media blitz did the trick.
Sad news today. The normally intelligent people of Ireland capitulated to a fear-mongering propaganda campaign, and voted for the Lisbon Treaty, 2:1.
National sovereignty in all of Europe is now a thing of the past. The “Treaty” is in fact a constitution, and all European national constitutions are now subservient to the terms of this self-amending Treaty.
‘Self-amending’ is all important: it means that the Brussels bureaucracy can add add new amendments to the Treaty at any time, and those amendments also supersede national constitutions. The Irish people were told that the Treaty “does not bring in military conscription”, “does not affect taxation”, and many other things that people in Ireland are not in favor of.
This was all lies. True, the Treaty itself does not talk about those specific items, but because of self-amending, those specific items can now “be brought in” at any time in the future. And Ireland’s voting power, in opposing measures, is very greatly reduced by the Treaty.
If the Treaty were a ‘good’ constitution, all of this might not be a bad thing. But it’s not. The structure of the EU government is very much less democratic than any of the current European governments.
Most of the power is vested in the EU Commission, none of whose members are elected. It’s like a Politburo, with lots of power and no accountability. And its polices are very much oriented around neoliberalism, globalism, privatization, and deregulation – the very things that have brought the global economy to a standstill and accelerated unemployment in Europe.
Both Holland and France had voted against the constitution, when it was openly called a constitution. So the bigwigs repackaged the very same thing and called it a “Treaty”. They did this so the people of France and Holland wouldn’t get another chance to vote it down. The “Treaty” could be passed by the legislatures – except in the case of Ireland.
The people of Ireland, God bless them, voted against the “Treaty” the first time they were given a chance to vote. But they weren’t able to keep their heads in the face of the overwhelming media blitz about how the world would fall apart if Ireland voted No a second time.
Europe is now under the firm control of a handful of unaccountable elitists in the EU Commission. Where they will take Europe is anybody’s guess, and there will be no democratic voice present in setting that direction.
Today will live in infamy, as its consequences become visible.
This is one more reason Obama will be lucky to have a second term and live to tell of it.
Personally I agree with the Times. But any hope of getting serious reform passed will founder on this if it’s pushed.
If Obama is LBJ, then Romney taking office in 2013 would be Nixon in 1968, with the mess in Vietnam/Pakghanistan nowhere near settled, the country and the Democratic Party utterly at odds with itself, soldiers shooting college students (see Pittsburgh, directly below), etc.
It’s in the script. Hard to see how Obama can re-write on the fly.
I love him for what he thinks and the spirit he has brought to politics. But more and more I fear that Hillary would have been more effective meat at this moment to feed to this sausage grinder of a Union.
Media talking points by a person named Perry at NewsMax, which feeds Fox News — re the bright side of a military coup to solve the “Obama problem” — were published on the NewsMax site this week.
Then taken down Wednesday (two days ago).
Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.
America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:
# Officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.”
# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized …
Goes on at some length.
First thought: a hoax.
But the crudeness of the language, screwy thoughts about the Constitution, were reminiscent of totalitarian hoplites that populate literature from behind the Iron Curtain.
And soon a Spokesvolker for Newsmax acknowledged the memo, telling TPM (where the text has been salvaged, linked above) that Perry was an “unpaid blogger.” The NewsMax site itself says he “contributes a regular column.”
What’s most important about the NewsMax piece is that it is not an isolated incident out standing in its field.
Rather, it’s surrounded by a bevy of high-brow generals who came out of retirement or obscurity in September to counter the Rumbling Thunder of the Miserable Media Tour of Dick Cheney, who should be history but apparently isn’t.
The Huffington Post dismisses the NewsMax memo as lunatic fringe. Um-hmm. Beer Hall Putsch … And again — but at least makes clear that, yes, the author is an ass raised on Age of Reagan television. Let’s see …
Associated Press – A U.S. Census worker found hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery had the word “fed” scrawled on his chest, a law enforcement official said Wednesday, and the FBI is investigating whether he was a victim of anti-government sentiment.
Some people have been guessing in the past two weeks that this is in the works.
Might explain some of the strange things happening with stocks and bonds and gold and the universe.
The strange things, in a nutshell: Bonds are saying the world is mired in deflation and not likely to change soon, and US bonds in particular — where the short and medium and long term Treasury yields are low (showing no worries about inflation) and the inflation-protected Treasury bonds (called TIPS) are stagnant.
Bonds in short are saying things are bad and going to get worse.
But the US stock market has been rallying since March, and refusing to go down despite a world of traders expecting it to do so. As if things were much improved and going to get better.
The dollar is crashing thru what some had hoped as late as a week ago was short-medium term support. And gold is rocketing, thru the $1000/oz psych level. These (like the bonds) would seem to say things are cruising for a bruising. So why are stocks rocketing?
And why are people buying US bonds (driving those yioelds down) if there is a panic underway with the dollar (which when devalued hurts bonds denominated in dollars)?
A scenario which makes sense of these apparent broad contradictions is a sudden revaluation of the Chinese currency (some call it Yuan, some REmimbi) against the dollar.
The chinese for a long time thru their Great Industrialization these past years held the Yuan fixed against the dollar. This Peg was relaxed a bit a few years ago but the chinese government still holds the Yuan low vs dollar with stern intent — by buying dollar-denominated bonds with the great influx of cash (in many currencies) it enjoys as the world’s sweatshop manufacturer of choice.
But at the same time, of course, Peking has been moaning and groaning as first Bush-Cheney and now Obama pursue policies that have broken all prior restraints on the US national debt. For the future here is clear — inflation. Which devalues that trillion in Treasuries Peking holds.
So the chinese are floating down river with a leg in the Buy Dollars boat and a leg in the Sell Dollars boat. (They want the Yuan low against the dollar to continue to fertizlize their industirial growth — but they see and fear the inflationary future of their dollar denominated holdings.)
If Peking does allow the Yuan to rise dramatically vs the dollar, gold would likely go to the moon, Chinese stocks in general would suffer, the dollar would tumble against all the major currencies, and everything one buys with dollars (eg oil, US Treasuries) would cost more merely as a matter of exchange, regardless of fundamentals.
It might trip off, sooner than anticipated, the Great Inflation / Dollar Devaluation that everyone sees on the horizon as the only way out of the great debt hole Uncle Sam has dug for himself since the 9/11 attacks.
The cure always begets another disease. Greenspan took us down to super low interest rates to try to keep things going post Tech Bubble Pop and 9/11.
Those low rates begat the credit and real estate bubbles.
Their popping begat the meltdown of the New York-London-based high-tech global financial system.
That has begotten this Depression, to treat which Washington a year ago went banannas with new debt.
Which leaves the Chinese with a foot in each of two boats, which the tides of history are pushing apart. They’ve been jawboning about the Dollar and reducing their dollar assets for several years now.
Perhaps the moment for the big move — allowing their currency to float — ie, CEASING to buy tons of dollars/dollars assets to keep their currency down — is upon us.
Here’s the last 18 months of the dollar. The DXY index.
Bottoming circa 78 or ready to revisit that 72 level??
This profile of the former Cigna exec who fell off his ass on the road to Damascus and has since become an advocate of relatively radical health care reform — answers all the questions again ludicrously in the air now that inbred ill educated assholes are showing up at Town Hall with machine guns.
Hillary — during the election campaign last summer — knew and warned that the health care battle would be a war. And she insisted that if you gave the insurance companies an inch they’d take a mile. She was ready for the war.
Obama, accustomed to charming people, seems to have thought Washington would like him so much that the institutional enemies of reform would cave in. This particular kind of naivete aside, he’s typical of his cohort — people who were impressionable still, ie teenagers, during the Reagantime and view the world thru the frame of corporate television that was born in the 80s.
The health care question is an aspect of the class war that the corporate class reignited during the 80s to found Globalization. It is called war for a reason. If Obama fails — with this astounding majority in the Congress — to get a public health care system up and running, then he will confirm fears of a year ago that he was not ready to be president.
He has the values, but may not have the vision. Hillary and Edwards both saw farther and deeper, into the deep ugly heart of what the USA became in the final quarter of the 20th century.
When News Corp reported quarterly results two weeks ago, Murdoch announced that all websites under the umbrella would convert to paid subscriptions.
No more free lunch.
What will this world be like in 5 years? The affluent will have something like journalism and the rest will be entertained?
The silcon-and-software revolution has been destroying the business of culture for twenty years. Music. Books. Now newspapers.
News Corp now dominates business news in the USA. Perhaps Murdoch’s move will blaze a trail, show the rest (and more worthy) how to survive the onslaught.
1. The long-term trend in American foreign affairs detailed in Chalmers Johnson‘s must-read SORROWS of EMPIRE — the trend of Pentagon aggregation of policy-making power in Washington via the simple step-wise business of building more and more bases …
The trend, of course, continues. Something like thirteen “permanent” american bases have been built in Iraq since 3/19/2003. And recent reports tell us that the Pentagon :
– has decided to pursue not only Terrorists but Drug Lords in Afghanistan. Support Your Local Sheriffs. Build them each a base.
– is negotiating the lease of seven army bases in Columbia from the Bogota government. The obvious policy worry here is re Venezuela (as the Times headline over the AP story makes clear).
If Obama allows Gates-Mullen to start a public war (as opposed to the meaty tenderizing in progress since early in the Bush-Cheneytime) along the Columbia-Venezuela border …
I find I have nothing to append to that “if” aside from a repeat of a repetition:
The shrinking portion of Washington policymaking that one might deem Discretionary more and more is made by the Pentagon. This uptrend began with the world wars, has never significantly corrected, and Obama for the past 18 months has shown no inclination to curb the Pentagon’s enthusiasms whatsoever.
Sorrows of an empire nobody needs.
2. The stark choices ahead of every major power on the planet are to cooperate as the resource and climate problems escalate, or to revert to the romantic nationalist philosophy of war of the early Modern centuries. That romance died in 1914, was buried in 1945, but rose again (in accordance with scripture) circa 1991, when the Soviet Union fell.
Most americans of our time were raised to believe in cooperation, the obvious exceptions being the likes of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and baby Bill Kristol, who with their ilk daydream of Israel and the USA taking on all comers six-guns ablaze, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The view has some basis perhaps in Tel Aviv. Where one stands is a function of where one sits, by and large.
But why Washington has fallen in love with world war remains something of a mystery here. Profound and near perfect despair, one guesses, must underlie it. The Likud Lobby alone does not seem to have the punch.
3. OR:
Perhaps when presented with the grim spectacle of a Nation (i.e., a people) pulling itself apart — as the American people have been since Reagan was installed to jumpstart Globalization — perhaps a self-destructive, incoherent foreign policy is precisely what one should expect.
3(a) The incoherence might be superficial. Might make perfect sense from an eccentric and very unpatriotic point of view held by Owner-Operators.
3(b) Or the incoherence might be deep, reflecting fundamental differences among factions of Owner-Ops — a covert struggle of the sort that erupted into the public space in the assassinations of the 60s. Watergate. The Iran-Contra octopus (which may well have included the murder of Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme).
On the home front, the governmental reaction to Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Again: what one might expect as the Owner-Operators cut ties to the body of the Nation.
And: An EPA director telling New York firemen and steelworkers on September 12, 2001 that the air over the smoking pile of the Trade Center is fine. Keep digging for gold, boys.
3(c) In either case — 3a or 3b — Joe Sixpack and Soccer Mom are not part of the conversation, or likely of the solution.
Which only feeds the anti-political, antisocial atmosphere where everybody’s hustlin’, Working Hard and Playing Hard, to leave the nine of ten hindmost behind.
A vicious downward spiral. Diagnosed in excellent eccentric books across the decades …
The Spoiled Child of the Western World, by Henry Fairlie, 1976. The Honey and the Hemlock, by Eli Sagan, 1991. Losing Our Souls, by Edward Pessen, 1993. A Nation Gone Blind, by Eric Larsen, 2006.
Obama is certainly the best chance to break the trend since Kennedy. Perhaps given the constellation of events, his chances are better than Kennedy’s were. But …
Chalmers Johnson concludes his little talk (video above) by suggesting that for Americans with a little cash on the side a condo in Vancouver — Canada — might not be a bad idea.
4. OR:
Let’s blame the whole mysterious mess of American foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union on my favorite martians — shall we?
Watch this episode — “The Warlord” — from I Spy, the late 60s show, then please comment as to whether it may have inspired (along with the Conrad) FF Coppola’s masterpiece a few years later.
The credits say that the episode was written by Robert Culp — the actor sharing the spotlight with Smokin’ Bill Cosby.
And at the very end one discovers the name of the actor playing the Warlord …
Also please comment on how it could be that television departed from this place circa 1969 (when The Name of the Game was airing “The White Birch” about the collapse of the Prague Spring) and ended up where it is today, where international affairs are treated in comic-book video-game fashion on the vile 24.
An American in Ireland, Richard Moore, worries often aloud about the world in articulate, informed style — at the moment about the Bilderbergers. Just now I dashed off a reply email that without trying hard encapsulates a view of the world (if not a Worldview):
The Bldbrgers are good and useful to consider. They don’t Run the World but they give insight into some of the people involved in the high level struggles to operate and endure the world.
They express a more European point of view than, eg, the Davos gatherings, which are more technocratic and global and American influenced. This European view is caught in our time in the middle, and I tend to sympathize with it.
I mean — the world today is dividing in a new way:
1. Russia and China, among the major powers, are still nation-states. Their owner-operators are still wed to their Nations (ie People). These powers can be read fairly easily as to what their interests are and how they are likely to behave to protect and forward them.
2. The US since the advent of the bomb has been ceasing to be a nation-state (if indeed it was ever a good idea to consider it as such).
(The bomb brought pressure to control events globally and to do so without major-power war; this pressure has been bending the minds of the people who run the National Security Apparat since the end of the war 1945. This is one big reason why the Apparat has grown so strong in Washington while the Congress has almost ceased to exist as a policy making body and the White House careers back and forth, with presidential heads more often than not winding up on platters.)
The owner-operators of the US began to reassert themselves behind Reagan’s smile and broad shoulders, having gone to school on the lessons of Vietnam (an educated working class is not a good idea, reliable pensions are not a good idea, fairly free and balanced mass media are not a good idea) and having realized that the technological revolution meant (re capital) that Globalization was the ticket.
To be extremely brief then: The US since the war has been morphing from something like a nation-state to a thing bestride the globe with two primary interests: to float the National Security Apparat (chiefly the Pentagon but also the mature so-called intelligence agencies) and to float the large globalizing corporations. Responsibility of the owner-operators for and to the Nation (ie People) has become almost neglible.
(Even the most Progressive voices among the American owner-operators are corporate-centric, as if someday Google may just blast off into space, Silent Running with Hughie, Dewey and Louie … )
3. Europe occupies too a rather new and strange space — having undertaken the Euro Union. But the traditional bonds between the component ruling classes and Nations (Peoples) — born of millenia of strife and tight geography — are still rather strong.
The Bilderbergers convey this uneasy place in the middle — between the brute classico Russian and Chinese nation-states and the global military-industrial enterprise based in the U.S.
Europe: Trying to “compete” with the run-amok North American colossus, while trying (as always) to survive the “Asian Hordes,” while trying to maintain the distinctly European take on the Individual-in-Society.
For my money, Europe’s approach to Modernity (the technological civilization that in the West succeeded Christendom) is superior to the American, the Russian and the Chinese. European societies seem to me superior.
So then — even though my own feet are rooted in the Working Class, I don’t find the Bilderbergers as alarming as some. (And I have always valued the reports from the chamber that Mr Estulin has been channeling for some time now.)
Rather, I find the entire careering planet alarming. Chiefly the unbridled advance of science these past two centuries, which has created monstrous wealth, technological processes and weapons that have left us and the earth at the mercy of forces I think NO one or one body of people has a chance to control, let alone govern. Everything put together sooner or later falls apart, as Paul Simon noted circa Watergate.
My view of Europe’s “superiority” doesn’t mean, of course, that if one had to bet on the Last Man Standing he should bet on the European Union. Indeed, many have been writing that the current financial crisis may ruin it.
Would Europe survive the Union’s disintegration? In some fashion, surely. Might that seismic de-centralizing move actually, despite costs, show us something of the way out of Modernity’s disaster? Too much to hope for, I suppose.
I don’t agree with some detail here but it’s certainly worth chewing on, particularly as we watch Obama sleepwalk (?) into the Pakghanistan quagmire.
The DVD can be ordered from Alex Jones’s web site: http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/obdedvd.html
Some nice tidbits in Mo Dowd this mornin’ re a Broadway comedy about the recently departed leader of the free world. Funny how dictators become objects of fun. The Eastern Europe experience of the late 80s, early 90s, now come to these shores.
All in good fun.Ă‚Â But I’ve got a bottle of bubbly in the fridge with Cheney’s name on it.Ă‚Â (No kidding)Ă‚Â Waitin’ on a dream …
Stable conditions need by no means be
pleasant conditions …
Click on pics to enlarge
.
2.Ă‚Â The much ballyhooed bank plan, rumored to be announced this coming Monday at noon, is now (friday evening) being leaked to the press and looks a disorganized mess, the product more than anything of an inability to agree on big moves.
Headed by Geithner, who has been there all along, this looks nothing like Change We Need.
Indeed, it seems the bulk of the second half of the TARP $700 billion will be — like the first — given to the banks with few strings. Will not be using the cash to buy the wounded assets or banks holding them; rather, will be “encouraging” private sector investors to do so.
I.e., Geithner has run thru the same cycle that Paulson did, bumping into the same obstacles, and backing down.Ă‚Â The banks have said get lost, and the new administration seems to lack the will to enforce whatever other ideas may lay between the president’s or Geithner’s ears.
Brings (again) to mind Walter Benjamin:
“Again and again it has been shown that society’s attachment to its familiar and long since forfeited life is so rigid as to nullify the genuinely human application of intellect and forethought — even in dire peril.”
It’s astounding how poorly prepared the new prez seems to have been on inauguration day, given the Change anthem of his campaign.
There’s colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shuffling their feet
People sleeping in their shoes
But there’s a warning sign on the road ahead
There’s a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead
The stock market had rallied this week on the hope of a decisive bank plan. I would now look for a turnaround, back down to test the lows of November. Those soft areas have been tested before, and such things tend to weaken with each probe. Perhaps, finally discouraged re Change, this time they will give way.
If so, look out below: Dow 4000. Keep on rockin’ in the Free World.
Here’s a good if convoluted chat about the current macro picture as the various economic powers twist in the breeze and try to protect themselves.
China in late October increased by several orders of magnitude its verbal attacks on the dollar. But in the wake of the G20 meeting it seems to have softened its own currency (by buying dollars) in an attempt to prop up its domestic industrial enterprises (which are suffering for lack of consumers in, to begin, the U.S.).
The dollar has been going upĂ‚Â for a month or so, generally speaking.Ă‚Â A good deal of this is flight from minor currencies (like Argentina’s, alas) based on fear that the local banks will collapse.
This component of the dollar’s recent surge won’t last.Ă‚Â Best guess is that soon enough the dollar will continue its plummet, and that long-term the chinese currency will rise.
The current dollar boost, then, might be imagined as the point in the sinking of the Titantic where the bow suddenly goes under the waves and the stern ascends to bring the ship nearly vertical — until it shaps amidships — upon which the stern falls like a brick into the sea.
And, as the dollar turns and sinks, the cost of oil (denominated in dollars) will go back up.
A debased dollar is good for people who make things with dollars and sell them in other currencies.Ă‚Â And for debtors, in general (assuming they can make their payments).Ă‚Â Otherwise it’s rather bad.
The President Elect met with his econoteam and then answered press questions for the first time today.
Meanwhile the people running GM and Ford told the world that time is running out.
Brusque types are saying “Let them go.” Down the drain.
But the employment consequences nationwide would be catastrophic, and it’s clear that Hammerin’ Hank Paulson, after fucking the globe royally with Lehman, is on the case.Ă‚Â A Treasury spokesman indicated that some of the TARP $700 billion might get thrown over the automakers to keep them dry awhile.
The full resolution may be nationalization (perhaps through the equity-kicker provisions of the TARP) — leaving something like Airbus in Europe:Ă‚Â a unified quasi-nationalized auto company.
Such an enterprise could be effectively directed by the incoming Donkey regime to the ends often indicated across the campaign years: a native auto industry fully dedicated to green cars.
Similar initiatives were crushed by the Reaganites immediately upon assumption of power in 1981, as they shut down Jimmy Carter’s Energy Department in support of the Oil Mafia status quo ante.
It illumines American democracy to look back across that expanse of time — lost time — and to think that it may take the triple whammy of high oil prices, a ruined financial system and bankrupted Ford and GM to finally pry loose the Oil Mafia’s grip on Washington.
(It’s often left unsaid that the core of the OM’s political power these many decades has been the Pentagon — which cannot run its tanks and aircraft on natural gas or the sun or the wind or nuclear power.)
The first Earth Day was in 1968.Ă‚Â Everything in the way of knowledge needed to act on our energy problems was known in the wake of the oil crunches of the 70s. Instead we got Reagan.Ă‚Â This time … We shall see.
