Wicked Intelligence, Dying Wisdom

Madame,

Budget deficits are being driven by the lingering deep recession, and all the food stamps, unemployment, etc. that arise from it; from Medicare Part D—a gift of the Bush era to pharmaceutical companies—; from interest on the debt; from the tax cuts; and from the two wars. 

And we divert ourselves in another round of holiday shopping.

WE of course are the problem even more than corporate greed.  We are demanding more stuff, more opportunities for stuff, more “traditions” of being able to compete for “bargains” (aided and abetted by deceptive corporate advertising, to be sure).  “Bargain-hunting blood lust,” one commentator put it.  And people are not shopping for others—2/3rds of their purchases are for themselves.

Our faltering and starved government (the money that is there often goes not so much to functional things, but to dysfunctional things) can’t keep weather satellites in operation.  More examples of faltering infrastructure.

What we really NEED (as opposed to our endless wants) is energy independence—clean energy—and we need investment in our young people.  We need investment in the right kind of infrastructure, and we need to reshape how we look at it.  We do need to address deficit spending, and already are, but our other priorities have evaporated.  I agree with Robert Reich that when we have two consecutive quarters of 6 percent unemployment or less and 3 percent annualized growth or more, we should automatically cut spending and raise taxes.

We forget that much of the country is in a drought.  NASA scientist James Hansen is so concerned about Arctic melt rate that he declared it a “planetary emergency.”  Where is the tax on carbon?  Forget credits and caps, the Wall Street speculators have already shown how much they would twist and corrupt such a process.  This is, as Bill McKibben writes, “the legacy issue of all legacy issues, one that stretches out into geologic time.”

We have a reckless war on the planet, as if we can buy another one.  Jobs don’t exist if the planet is biosphere dead for most life.

If you’re listening for the alarm bells, there aren’t hardly any, and most of what do exist are so faint you can’t detect them above the cacophony.  For it serves the plutocrats leading us into wreckage just fine.  Their outlook is short, their objectives selfishly blind.  They would rather have us diverted by materialism, or the inane, or the pettiness of culture wars.  They are brilliant; but their lack of wisdom is on its way to wrecking us.