Harvey Wasserman : A Blue-Mooning, Baby-Booming New Year

The second full moon in a single month is commonly known as a 'blue moon,' and that's what we saw on New Year's Eve.Photo by Vatsyayana / Getty.
Our blue-mooned, baby-boomed 64th birthday baptism...

When we believed ourselves immortal, as all young people do, there was nothing we could not do. Now we count the victories, and assess what we might win in the time left us.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / January 2, 2010

'Will you still need me? Will you still feed me...?' -- The Beatles

The moment has come. The first Baby Boomer cohort has turned 64.

It officially happened on midnight December 31-January 1, 2009-10.

I celebrated the moment seven hours and 24 minutes early by jumping into a tiny cove in the Florida Bay.

The chilly but exhilarating water demanded an answer: Will we green the Earth? Will we win social justice? Will we get to Solartopia?

Unlike so many of you reading this, I am not a Boomer. The demographic officially extends from January 1, 1946 to December 31, 1964. It is a giant elephant of a population explosion swallowed by a decades-long python of a population decline.

The soldiers coming back from World War II multiplied like rabbits. The Boom was worldwide. In the U.S. it birthed some 76 million children.

My dad was a submarine welder in Boston’s shipyards, so I came early: at 4:36 p.m., December 31, 1945. Thus the leap into the Bay, which is in desperate need of protection from the ravages of agricultural monsters who are destroying the Everglades on which this fragile but irreplaceable eco-system depends for a clean, steady flow of water.

Those of us who took that astonishing tour through the 1960s have to think of ourselves as “forever young.”

But 64 is a big number. It means many of us have lost one or both of our parents, or are taking care of them as they become increasingly infirm.

It also means WE are meeting such ailments. “Parts wear out,” my mother said.

And we’re “at that age” when we lose friends and lovers, spouses and siblings, and sometimes, worst of all, even children.

“Learning experience” can never fully cover the losses of loved ones. But they do remind us our own days are numbered.

When we believed ourselves immortal, as all young people do, there was nothing we could not do.

Now we count the victories, and assess what we might win in the time left us.

In our lifetimes, undeniable strides have been made in civil rights -- for African-Americans and, in tandem, for women, for GLBT and for other national and ethnic minorities, as well as for those with special challenges.

Social justice is another story. Since the end of the New Frontier/Great Society, with the horror of the Vietnam War, income disparities have worsened. Those social programs did work. Now the gap between rich and poor, a downfall of all great nations, is escalating, with no end in sight. We have long had the means to end poverty and hunger, and have chosen simply not to do it.

The root of that choice is war. The Vietnam assault was the biggest blunder of our lifetime. Everything is worse because of it, from homelessness and poverty to the decline of our educational and health systems. That successive Boomer presidents have chosen to repeat the error in Iraq and Afghanistan is beyond tragic.

Likewise the environment. The green movement has many roots. But the fight against nuclear power was the first to put thousands of Americans onto the streets and into the jail cells, and must be ready to do so again. Talk of reviving this failed technology is beyond lunatic.

Above all, in our lifetime, the globalized corporation has metastasized into the most powerful institution in human history. A cancerous beast that has usurped human rights without human responsibilities, the trans-planetary corporation is now beyond the reach of the nation-state. Only a global green movement, tied through the internet and whatever else we can contrive, can overcome the sinister power of these interlinked financial machines, whose only goal is profit.

To fight back, we need a vision, a Solartopian greenprint.

We need to attack the corporation at its root, in its legal charter and wherever we can find a foothold.

To kill the cancer, we must eliminate waste and its worst expression, war, the ultimate breeding ground of illegitimate power.

Only with peace can we win a true democracy, based on social justice. All humans have the right to food, shelter, clothing, medicine, educatio, and dignity. In tandem must come the paper ballot, hand counted, with universal automatic voter registration.

Our food needs to be organically raised, with sustainable agricultural practices.

The question of how many humans our planet can sustain will be answered with the empowerment of women. With equal access to education, employment and reproductive rights, the mothers of our species will bring us a sustainable number of children.

As that happens we can eliminate fossil and nuclear fuels, replacing them with the Solartopian technologies that really work, including solar, wind, sustainable biofuels, geothermal, ocean thermal, tidal, wave, current and other forms of renewables not yet conceived. In a maximally efficient world, with revived mass transit, the green transition we must win to survive does become doable.

So this Blue-Mooned New Year’s Eve, with my growing-up-all-too-fast daughter on my back, we jumped into the Barley Basin to commemorate that moment 64 years ago when my saintly mother gave her final push to get me into this world. The demographic deluge would boom in less than eight hours.

With Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time” running through our brains, the equation simplified:

“With justice comes peace... with peace comes freedom... with freedom, all is possible... even Solartopia.”

That should keep us busy for a while, yes?

The next blue mooned New Year’s Eve is scheduled for 2028. See you then... on a green-powered Earth.

[Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with A Glipmse of the Big Light: Losing Parents, Finding Spirit, and Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States]

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Fear in 2009: Year of the Bullet

"Playing with Guns." Photo from Mikesjournal.
The fear stimulus:
Year of the Bullet 2009

For every claim that the Obama landslide transformed American culture in 2009 we have 'bullet points' that document a grassroots prairie fire of gut fear...

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / December 31, 2009

As one hand of history played high keys of hope and change during the inaugural days of 2009, the other hand was reaching for more ominous sound. Across the keyboard of our national concerto, some chimed celebration, others hoarded bullets.

Reporter Harry Pierson Curtis of the Orlando Sentinel wrote about the 2009 stampede for small arms and ammo in early February: “Most in demand is handgun ammunition, including 9 mm and .45-caliber for semiautomatic pistols and .38-caliber for revolvers.” Customers, retailers, manufacturers, and interest groups all had something to say. The usual American demand for 7 billion rounds of ammo per year (23 bullets per capita?) was fixin’ to head North.

“The Ammo Boom is No Dud,” declared ESPNOutdoors.com in late March. Special contributor Colin Moore attributed the “irrational” hoarding frenzy to a “fear factor” caused by the Democratic Party landslide. Handgun owners, especially, were worried that their ammo would soon be taxed into extinction. One Winchester bullet factory was said to be working 24/7 to meet the hyped-up demand.

By Labor Day, the Los Angeles Gun Club had imposed a four-box limit on ammo sales per customer per visit, reported L.A. Times writer W. J. Hennigan. Bullet manufacturers were running “full bore.” Even the military was outsourcing contracts to fill its need for 1.6 billion rounds per year.

Quarterly excise-tax figures posted November 2 by Ted Novin for the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) confirmed that the gun and ammo sector of the national economy was pumped up. Tax reports for the second-quarter of 2009, compared to the second quarter of 2008, were “up 44.4 percent for handguns, 51.3 percent for long guns, and 57.5 percent for ammunition.” Since the tax rate had not been raised, the increasing tax amounts could be roughly equated to rising sales. Gross Domestic Product meanwhile had fallen over the same two quarters, year over year. For bullet makers, fear of Obama Democrats turned out to be a stealth stimulus.

On the export front, USA ammo manufacturers also logged record sales to global customers. According to a Census Bureau database, exports of small arms ammunition through the first ten months of 2009 have exceeded $2 billion compared to $2.17 billion for all twelve months of 2008.

Through October 2009 we can sort the top eight client nations for American-made small-arms ammo into three clubs: the $Hundred-Million, $Two-Hundred-Million, and $Three-Hundred-Million Clubs. Five members of the $Hundred Million Club received small arms ammo exports ranging from $105 million to $150 million: Poland, Canada, Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia. In the $Two-Hundred-Million Club are two states: the United Kingdom, whose common-law traditions formed the foundation of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment; and Japan, the home of the Peace Constitution. One country stands alone in the $Three-Hundred-Million Club. Can you guess? Israel.

In 2008, the $Two-Hundred-Million Club was curiously occupied by The Netherlands, which has only booked about $17 million in ammunition receivables through October 2009. Israel in all of 2008 had purchased $184 million in American-made ammo supplies. So far in 2009, small arms ammo sales to Israel are up 69 percent.

As an item in the 2009 national account, small arms ammo has been good for GDP and for the balance of trade. Although imports of small-arms ammo are up slightly, edging toward $800 million for the year, American bullet makers are likely to end the year by maintaining something close to a three-to-one trade advantage over their foreign competitors. When it comes to guns and ammo, America knows her stuff.

Shopping for guns in Las Vegas. Photo by Ethan Miller / Getty Images / Life.
According to Google Trends, the “ammunition” search term has leveled out to normal since its Second Quarter spike, although its value to the news industry seems to be steadily growing these past few years. Salt Lake City ranks first for taking interest in the term, followed by Phoenix, Denver, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, Portland, Tampa, Austin, and Orlando (three cities in Texas, two in Florida, nothing on the East Coast North of Florida or the West Coast South of Portland). If you don’t shop for bullets, you might be interested to read what “ammunition” looks like under Google shopping. Kubrick fans should check out the Winchester Full Metal Jacket Value Pack.

Political theorist Hanes Walton, Jr. developed the concept of the “political context variable” to analyze what happened to history between 1965 and 1995. In the Year of the Bullet 2009 we find hard-core evidence of a singular economic countertrend that defies deindustrialization and depression. If political contexts have a material basis, then we have something material to consider about the political context of the first Obama year.

For every claim that the Obama landslide transformed American culture in 2009 we have “bullet points” that document a grassroots prairie fire of gut fear. If progressive activists have felt tiredness in their bones, it may have something to do with a visceral recognition that fear is what we are fighting but never get the chance to confront.

“Contextual transformation in the political arena is a multi-phased process,” argues Walton, Jr. “First, a desire to transform the political context must be evident, along with a strategy. Second, that desire and strategy must become institutionalized.” What progressives generally want is a different kind of fearlessness than the kind you buy with bullets. Yet the strategy of confronting bullets is not quite the strategy of confronting the fear that organizes the production and distribution of bullets. There will not be an end to the boom in bullets until the fear itself is busted.

In parts of Obama’s agenda there seems to be a spark of fearlessness. Health care security would supplement social security as a means of reducing the daily experience of fear. But Obama is also from the Jane Addams school of social progress, which means he’s not going to make a step forward today that people didn’t first demand yesterday. In 2009, people’s fear of health care insecurity got mowed over by louder fears. How do we strategize and institutionalize a truly disarming fearlessness? In the progressive activism of our post-9/11 world, every time we turn around another fear come smashing up.

Organizers of the upcoming SHOT Show in Las Vegas (Jan. 19-22) report that interest is up for “the world's premier exposition of combined firearms, ammunition, archery, cutlery, outdoor apparel, optics, camping and related products and services.” If you go to Vegas for the SHOT Show, make sure you are a member of the industry (or media) and don’t forget that “personal firearms or ammunition are not allowed.” You don’t see industry attorneys challenging the Second Amendment infringements of that rule. In the end, even the purveyors of guns and ammo would rather push that fear out their door.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com.]

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2009 and the Economy : Not So Good

'It is getting awful damn hard to be optimistic about the US economy these days. If the problem can be fixed at all, it will probably really require an unprecedented degree of global cooperation.'
By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / January 2, 2009

Here are two interesting, widely read, and intelligent viewpoints regarding where the US economy is headed in 2009. I would advise that they be read in full. Reading Kunstler is like drinking fine champagne. Bottom line: It is getting awful damn hard to be optimistic about the US economy these days. If the problem can be fixed at all, it will probably really require an unprecedented degree of global cooperation.

First we have James Howard Kunstler, a widely read blogger and writer, who wrote the book "The Long Emergency" on the long-range nature of the current economic crisis. It should be noted that Kunstler successfully predicted the beginnings of the current economic crisis as being centered on energy problems back in early 2005; note this link.

Kunstler's crystal ball may thus be regarded as being admirably clear as judged by his track record. Plus his thinking is complemented with a wealth of detail. Following are a few snips from Kunstler's 2009 forecast (well worth reading in full, IMO).

Forecast for 2009

. . .Without reviewing all the vertiginous particulars of the year now ending, suffice it to say that the US economy fell on its ass and that the "global economy" did a face-plant as well. The American banking sector imploded spectacularly to the degree that investment banking actually went extinct -- as if a meteor landed on the corner of Madison Avenue and 51st Street. The response by our government was to shovel "loans" onto the loading dock of every organization that pretended to be something like a bank, while "bailing out" an ever-longer line of corporate claimants with a pitiable song-and-dance. The oil markets went on a roller coaster ride. The housing bubble collapse grew to avalanche velocity (taking out whole colonies of realtors, mortgage brokers, and construction contractors in its path), the commercial real estate sector developed hemorrhagic fever, retail drove off a cliff on Christmas Eve, the stock market fell in the toilet, jobs and incomes went up in a vapor, and tens of millions of ordinary citizens addicted to revolving credit found themselves in a life-and-death struggle for the means of existence.

None of this is over yet. . .

[. . . .]

Apart from "cleaning up Dodge," so to speak, and from issues of collective character-and conscience-in-office, I worry that the avalanche of troubles already ongoing will overwhelm Mr. Obama and his people .It's also well worth worrying whether they will pursue policies similar in kind to the ones pursued by Bush, namely throwing money at everything and anything, and it sure looks like they are planning to do just that. I am especially concerned about an "infrastructure stimulus" project aimed at highway improvement at the expense of public transit. This would be the epitome of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We need to begin planning right away for a transition away from automobiles, not in order be good socialists but because Happy Motoring is at the core of our unsustainability trap. The car system is going to fail in manifold ways whether we like it or not, and it will fail due to circumstances already underway. For one thing, it will cease to be democratic as the remnants of the middle class find it impossible to get car loans, or pay for fuel, or insurance, and that will set in motion a very impressive politics-of-grievance setting apart those who are still able to enjoy motoring and those who have been foreclosed from it. Contrary to what you might make of the current situation in the oil markets, we are in for a heap of trouble with both the price and supply of petroleum (more on this below). And there is no chance in hell that any techno rescue remedy to keep all the cars running by other means will materialize. . .

[. . . .]

[Regarding inflation] This is the "other shoe" that a lot of people are waiting to drop. Right now we are caught up in a compressive debt deflation as mortgages stop "performing" and loans of all kinds are welshed on. Since money is loaned into existence, and a great many loans are not being repaid, then a lot of money is going out of existence. That's what I mean when I say that capital is leaving the system. At the same time, the Federal Reserve has made good on its promise to drop money from helicopters if necessary to prevent an implosion of the banking system (as all that older money goes out of existence), and so it's now a question as to when the amount of new money will exceed the disappeared old money. (Of course when I say money, I mean "money," because we are dealing here in a shadow realm of assumed value.) In any case, there is bound to be a lag period between the time that the Fed's money is dropped from the choppers and the time it actually filters through the banks and other recipients to the so-called "real economy" of people who buy and sell real things. The credible estimates I hear run between six and 18 months.

I'll only venture to guess that we could see the start of serious inflation sometime in 2009. To some extent, all currencies are now free-falling together, some at slightly faster rates than others, but the situation of the US dollar is so grotesquely dire, and our structural imbalances so monumental, that it is hard to imagine that our currency will not win the international race to the bottom. Gold resumed its movement upward against the dollar a week before Christmas, and that may be an early sign. The government -- and anyone badly in debt -- benefits much more from inflation than deflation, so every effort will be made to avert the latter. The trouble lies in the government's dumb incapacity to control dangerous things that it sets in motion, so that an inflationary campaign to avoid compressive deflation can so easily lead to a fiasco of super or hyper inflation -- the kind that kills governments and turns societies into murderous monsters. I'll forecast the that the US dollar is worth 40 percent of its current value by next Christmas. . .

As a second example of judging where the US economy is headed, we have the following snips extracted from an article by Peter S. Goodman in the New York Times. The article notes with some alarm that the US government is printing, permitting, and spreading around gargantuan amounts of freshly generated cash and credit as an emergency measure, since the hundreds of billions of dollars in bank bailouts didn't have much effect in stopping and reversing the current deflationary spiral.

The Treasury Dept, in cooperation with the Federal Reserve, and many other top US government officials, is generating trillions in new money and credit, including lowering the prime interest rate to zero (the interest rate that the biggest banks have to pay on their federal loans). The theory, in accord with classic Keynesian theory, is that sooner or later, when everyone including the banks are waist-deep in cash, they will be in a mood to start spending it more freely again. Flooding the economy with lots of cash will no doubt get folks spending again at some point.

The downside is that whenever the psychology finally does turn around, it is likely to turn around rather suddenly and unpredictably. Whenever this happens, average cash-strapped consumers who are already strapped by credit card debt are likely to focus their spending on those consumer necessities that are already in short supply. Things like heating oil, gasoline, and food. Such vital necessity prices are likely to get bid up pretty fast. Meanwhile those investors who have extra cash, and with a sense of history, are more likely to spend it on bars of gold, rather than as previously on second homes in Palm Beach or trips to Las Vegas. The New York Times piece lacks the vigor and predictive clarity of Kunstler's predictions, but a lot of the message is the same.

Debt Sweat: Printing Money – and Its Price

. . .The value of outstanding American Treasury bills now reaches $10.6 trillion, a number sure to increase as dollars are spent building bridges, saving auto jobs and preventing the collapse of government-backed mortgage giants. Worry centers on the possibility that foreigners could come to doubt the American wherewithal to pay back such an extraordinary sum, prompting them to stop — or at least slow — their deposits of savings into the United States.

That could send the dollar plummeting, making imported goods more expensive for American consumers and businesses. It would force the Treasury to pay higher returns to find takers for its debt, increasing interest rates for home- and auto-buyers, for businesses and credit-card holders.

"We got into this mess to a considerable extent by overborrowing," said Martin N. Baily, a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Now, we're saying, 'Well, O.K., let's just borrow a bunch more, and that will help us get out of this mess.' It's like a drunk who says, 'Give me a bottle of Scotch, and then I'll be O.K. and I won't have to drink anymore.' Eventually, we have to get off this binge of borrowing."

Some argue that the moment for sobriety is long overdue, and postponing it further only increases the ultimate costs. "Our government doesn't have enough spare cash to bail out a lemonade stand," declared Peter Schiff president of Euro Pacific Capital, a Connecticut-based trading house. "Our standard of living must decline to reflect years of reckless consumption and the disintegration of our industrial base. Only by swallowing this tough medicine now will our sick economy ever recover."

But most economists cast such thinking as recklessly extreme, akin to putting an obese person on a painful diet in the name of long-term health just as they are fighting off a potentially lethal infection. In the dominant view, now is no time for austerity — not with paychecks disappearing from the economy and gyrating markets wiping out retirement savings. Not with the financial system in virtual lockdown, and much of the world in a similar state of retrenchment, shrinking demand for American goods and services. . .

[. . . .]

. . .The most frequently voiced worry about the bailouts is that the Fed, by sending so much money sloshing through the system, risks generating a bad case of rising prices later on. That puts the onus on the Fed to reverse course and crimp economic activity by lifting interest rates and selling assets back to banks once growth resumes.

But finding the appropriate point to act tends to be more art than science. The Fed might move too early and send the economy back into a tailspin. It might wait too long and let too much money generate inflation.

"It's a tricky business," says Allan H. Meltzer, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, and a former economic adviser to President Reagan. "There's no math model that tells us when to do it or how.". . .

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