Living amidst the detritus of black enslavement, a veteran of the 60s who carried on throughout the 70s until I was blown out of the water; in exile for twenty years; then returned under pretense to a country that had lost its soul and was lead by a crass incurious leader whose constant ignorance and ideological nonsense could only sicken, how could I but welcome Obama when faced with Sarah Palin and McCain’s false self.
Yet I know that the task of putting humpty-dumpty together again is nigh on impossible and the illusory return of sane attitudes as expressed by Joan Didion: “Irony was now out
Naiveté translated into ‘hope was now in
Innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized
Partisanship could now be appropriately expressed by consumerism.”

might be a barrier to success rather than an aid to solving problems. Problems that must be handled pragmatically always with the idea of seizing the possibility of change when a window opens. Attitudes that can be reinforced by both renewed hope and a lack of irony, but must now become ideological, for it is ideology that killed the best of the 60s and ideology could easily kill this wonderful surge that swept Obama into office and left Ms. Clinton and the Republicans with a sense of having missed something.
Obama must govern from the center. The USA is a centrist country and we need leadership, now; leadership that represents as many of us that can crowd into the wide tent that is being created.
Those who demur can provide a loyal opposition, if they raise their tone. What Palin and the media that support her have created is mainly cacophony that can mostly be ignored and due to the fact that Rush and other ideologues similar to him represent millions, indicative of how far out of touch with reality so much of our policy has become: background radiation that speaks of distant events.
We are facing economic meltdown. 2008 could eventually be seen as being as important a date as 1945 (the defeat of fascism) and 1991 (the defeat of communism).
The brand of cowboy capitalism that has scorned the working man and left the American middle class – the bedrock of any civilized society – feeling raped is over.

Capitalism is very productive. Wherein it fails is commonsense and distribution. Its focus on a linear variable, profit or more is destructive of both the environment, not in a green sense, but in the deepest meaning of the word survival. We are on a course to destroy the very basis of our existence and those who deny the data could produce a greater catastrophe than our present occupant who just demonstrated the results of eight years of ignoring data.
Two concepts would help us all think about the future in a constructive way – both indicate the need to displace profit or more as the center of our economic focus, which, alas, for so many Westerners (lead by Americans) defines the totality of their life.

Suboptimalization is one. It defines a situation in which the exclusive focus on one variable in a system, compromises the entire system. Just slow down for a moment, read and ponder instead of scanning.
Think upon what has happened recently: the protection afforded to risk – all those complex alphabetical conundrums – has become the basis of enormous risk itself, due to the total focus on profit. In such a system, risk has suboptimized the system it was supposed to protect.

The second concept is requisite variety. It postulates that a complex system requires a number of variables that can be monitored and modulated when necessary. To attempt to maintain a system as complex as the world economy with essentially one linear variable is to court disaster.

As we attempt to cure the problem, we must do a number of things. One of them, perhaps the most difficult, is to shift into a measurement system that is more complex than profit.
Another task, just as difficult, is to reconstitute as much of our economy on a basis that allows us to use as little non-renewable energy as possible, re-employ as much “waste” as possible and focus tens of billions of dollars upon conservation.
If we had listened, with only one ear, to Amory Lovens since the 1970s about conservation – doing more with less – we would be leading the world by example instead of being the focus of so much hatred.
An adequate society, one as wealthy as ours, can provide the basics for all. It would not destroy our wealth, but it would life us all. My experience in living in Stockholm, in France, Dublin, a Spanish island and the English countryside made this clear.
No economy, no society, can solve all human problems. But provision of the basics for everyone certainly aides the quest for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Americans seem so afraid of words that speak of providing for those less fortunate, yet are very charitable.

To regain our place at the head of the table will require some deep changes in a dangerous world as Mumbai has made clear.
We can only do it by example. The real work is to slowly bring the USA back to its senses. Most of ours systems are not functional. That is particularly true of our justice system: a fact that I have experienced directly.

Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
By David Cay Johnston
Portfolio, 2007
352 pages

“The country bathed in God is now practising an economic driven morality that would cause any observant god to loose a flood.”
Free Lunch could be dedicated to Sgt. Friday: “Just the facts Ma’am.” In that sense it is the book of an award winning New York Times reporter who has written 26 chapters demonstrating the thievery that has been standard practise for over two decades in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Each chapter tells a narrative story or two that should have produced a response that would have dwarfed what is presently going on in Greece.
Assets earned by the majority of house houses – most now containing at least two wage earners who are working over 350 hours a year, just to maintain: a kind of running in place that calls to mind a treadmill – have hardly increased in decades, while a relatively small group of fellow Americans have made out like the bandits that just paid a visit to Harry Winstons just before closing time.
Abetting this trillion dollar transfer of assets have been most Congressmen, so the great theft could be called legal if without conscience.
The facts devastate: the reporting is as good as you could hope for. It is a quasi-legal bill of particulars that is an indictment of the entire American system that is now a sad parody of the hopes expressed by our founders and expressed so succinctly: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.”
Goals and guiding principles that have been mocked in all aspects of life by recent American collective behavior. Behavior, as it relates to all aspects of our economic life, that Free Lunch describes with great clarity.
His book provides the basic facts for the death of capitalism, though he does not talk in such terms and Karl Marx whose shadow now hangs over our age once again, in spite of the collapse of the USSR, is absent from the book and the index.
Johnston relies upon the bible and Adam Smith as his strictures are moral, as are the faults he castigates so thoroughly, not technical or historical.
This book was finished before our current disaster emerged, but listen to Johnston’s prescience: “What makes such huge returns possible is not just computer programs that spot pricing gaps. What fuels hedge funds is debt. Lots and lots of debt. Hedge funds and banks have become joined like algae and fungus to form financial lichen. And just as attractive lichens can be poisonous, so can this financial symbiosis, with its attractive investment returns, turn toxic.” (p. 251-2)
“Of course, if things go badly, the investor can be wiped out. Banks foolish to lend so much can also suffer huge losses. If the banks have no idea how many intertwined, cross-connected deals their money is in, and something unexpected goes wrong, it could wreak havoc with the global financial markets.” (p. 252)
And the kicker: “that consideration goes to lenders and virtually none to borrowers, is central to the creed of government as a source of greater wealth for those already rich enough to have money to lend.”

His immersion in the reporting of the scurrilous dealings that now characterize our social/economic behavior, as presently emblemized by the Governor of Illinois, created a deep insight into our greed and its functioning, marking Free Lunch a wonderful primer.
We now need lots of good theory to put it all in Context and those who have the courage to talk about what is going on: the extreme class war and the turning of democratic America into an oligarchy run by the rich.
Read Free Lunch in the meantime, as facts begin any real process of change and if we are to survive as a nation we must fully expose what is behind the facts that Johnston lays out so well and heed Adam Smith: “what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”