For those who imagine that the euphoria over Obama's election is universal, do keep in mind that it is shared by only two out of three Americans. A solid third of the populace would do just about anything to have Sarah Palin in charge this morning. In fact, they believe that is their right, and it is the only outcome that is right by Heaven. These folks aren't going away. We all get to live with them.
What may be going away is the most powerful political, financial, media machine the world has seen to date, in the form of the generic conservative movement in America within both political parties, but most specifically within the Republican Party.
That Party has thrown its weight around since 1980, always on the basis of vast, borrowed sums of foreign capital, and has lately come to the state of affairs such profligacy always comes to -- complete collapse, brought about by the failure of rotten, rotten foundations.
That Party had held together a fragile voting coalition of evangelicals, libertarians, true conservatives, big industry, high finance, and neocon shysters for decades, largely by richly rewarding its financial backers while teasing popular support out of the Christianists and conservatives by feeding them cultural myths about their innate superiority, and exceptionalism.
That coalition is broken now. None of the factions trust one another. These factions will now seek passage aboard the Democratic fleet, of course, so watch the Democratic Party change to accept them. Rahm Emmanuel is dreaming Rovian dreams of a permanent majority this morning.
But dreams of political hegemony are of little import if the whole nation is sinking into the sands of time. What is starkly clear to anyone with a facility for addition is that the economic foundations of America are rotten to the core, and that neither euphoria nor hope nor a permanent Democratic majority will address the rot. Only addressing the rot will do that, and that means taking apart the current system to a dramatic degree.
Not celebrating it, not steering it this way or that, but largely dismantling it before it ruins us and the coming generations beyond all redemption. The trickle down economy has run its course. Things are completely out of control at this point, and more of the same remedies and business as usual is not only pointless, but criminal stupidity.
America's banking and manufacturing sectors are as hollowed out and gutted as they can be, and yet stand. The defense industry is the only solid sector, since it spends as much every year as the entire rest of the world does on their defense industries -- and yet every single penny of America's defense budget is borrowed from abroad. Every penny, and then some.
The government recently increased the national debt by over a trillion dollars in 23 days. It will likely do this several times again before January 20th, and then again after. There is no Social Security fund or lockbox, nor is there a Medicare fund, nor are the government pensions funded. All of that is Treasury IOU's, noted down in a notebook, to be paid some distant day out of tax revenue from a booming economy that is imagined into place to fit these schemes.
The conservative movement is widely recognized nowadays as organized theft. Too late for America, but that is how it is seen now that it has collapsed under its own weight of fraudulent claims and falsehoods. It has left America close to broken, not just broke. Obama has inherited a nation with serious engine trouble. A house with cracked foundations, falling timbers, and a few fires on the main floor.
Just as one must take into account what is still standing when one renovates a building, Obama must take into account how severely unbalanced, and dysfunctional the American economy is. It is leaning way, way forward into a headwind, a jet stream of foreign loans, and has been doing so for such a long time that Americans call that extraordinary state of affairs 'normal.'
It isn't normal, and it is over.
The economic collapse going on around the world is just getting started, and the most obvious outcome for America is the loss of this immense headwind over the course of the coming year. Even if China wants to sell us consumer goods, and the Saudis want to sell us oil, the American citizens are tapped out. We are maxed on loans, cash, equity, mortgages, you name it. We've stopped spending, and stopped borrowing, and are looking for jobs in order to stay in our homes.
Henry Ford was smart enough to pay his workers solid wages, so that they could buy the cars they were making. The conservatives have not been that smart. They just took the money, and declared any American who had no money, and no job, and no prospects for an education to be immoral, lazy, selfish, and undeserving. Even a living wage is a sin against their world view. Three meals a day, a roof, and a doctor once a year is beyond their conception of humanity.
These ideas, and these people who espouse them obstinately against all evidence of their innate, self-defeating stupidity, have wrecked America, and wrecked it real good. If it is all totaled up, balance sheet style, the theft of America's wealth and prosperity is close to complete. It has disappeared relentlessly into the coffers of the richest of the rich for a generation, into the hands of already rich people who knowingly, specifically, created, financed, pushed, and sold the conservative philosophy upon the American populace, spreading money on all sides through astronomical deficits, all the while preaching and pretending that all that borrowed money was due to the success of their voodoo economics.
It was all outright fraud. Swindling and chicanery throughout. It was legal only because they bought the legislators who rewrote the laws to make it legal. On paper, it is not the biggest, most mind-boggling upward transfer of wealth in human history. On paper.
It still is what it is. There has never been a theft this large. Ever.
Barack Obama's single biggest challenge is to educate Americans about their stupidity. Nine-tenths of them are unaware that we have been thoroughly cornholed by a tiny sliver of clever rich people masquerading as public servants, respectable investors, and pillars of society.
His second challenge is to get the nation standing up straight again, out of that jet stream of foreign debt. This necessarily means putting the defense industry budget on the cutting block. It also means taxing the thieves atop the economy so that the wealth stops flowing into so few hands, and flows again out among the people who work every day. He needs to turn off the vacuum cleaner Reagan and his progeny turned on. The floor is bare. The kitchen is bare. Enough already.
His third challenge is to put Americans to work on knowing themselves, and governing themselves. To turn euphoria and hero worship right back at the people themselves, convincing them that the task of running the nation is in their hands, in their minds, and not in any one person's hands. This necessarily means taking elections away from monied donors, and returning it to the public coffers, and only the public coffers.
Business as usual won't do. That has collapsed, and is not coming back.
Business as Paulson, Bush, and Wall Street have been running it these past few months is just a continuation of the grand theft. A picking over of the bones. A borrowing against the corpse of the Republic.
I do not feel any euphoria over this election. No politician of the left ran for office. All politics in America is right, and more to the right.
I voted for Obama yesterday, as my only practical means of voting against the conservative movement.
As his national campaign moves from campaigning to governing, as hope hits the road, Obama will do none of these things, I know. Instead, he will continue the war on oil-bearing nations, probably move on Pakistan, continue to bail out the banking industry well beyond the breaking point of the Treasury, and probably do the same for the auto industry and airlines. That's what the powers that be are clamoring for.
Worst, he will use America's somewhat renovated image abroad to protect and expand that jet stream of foreign money America leans so very heavily upon.
The Chicago School of economics is still in charge. More of the same. America will not stand up. America will lean harder, and hope that works out.
Hope won't do a damned thing. There are some damned hard things to do in America, and right now. Obama is up at bat next, but I don't know if he's going to work for America, or for the American Empire.
One of those things is beyond saving. Does he recognize that?