The Last Seven Months

The day after the last post, 9/18/08, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke announced that the bottom was about to fall out of the U.S. and world financial system. Most major commercial banks and investment banks were insolvent because the high risk bets made on the housing market, securitized by too-high leveraged bets by Wall Street high rollers, fizzled, big time. Since that fateful day, the U.S. government has invested at least a trillion and a quarter dollars into the bankrupt banks and investment houses plus the world's largest insurer, A.I.G. This was the surprise that "W" left our new president, Barack Obama, for his honeymoon. Supposedly, after seven months, the fall has become less precipitous, says the Fed and Treasury.

The damages have been painful to many millions who've lost their jobs. The rate of job loss is over 600,000er month and to date more than 6 million are living off of unemployment insurance., and that doesn't count those whose benefits have expired. Foreclosure rates are rising fast, notwithstanding emergency measures for many troubled owners. Banks are still shy on lending and small business owners, and students are too often unable to get banks to take a risk. The bastards.

We'll probably pull out of this ditch, not soon, but perhaps within the year begin to climb out with traction. The Obama administration has before Congress now its proposed budget for '09-'10 at $3.6 trillion. More debt and the prospect for cutting into the deficit in the next couple years is very dim. The outlook for the national debt is that it will exceed $13 trillion, and the annual deficit about $1.3 trillion. It's a bloody mess, but the choices are between more or less, and draconian cuts are pure fantasy. It's like a giant machine whose balance wheel is too heavy to slow down, much less stop the slide, and we'll all have to hang on tight and stay cool.

The choruses of Nay-Sayer's is gaining momentum slowly but surely. All those experts who were sleeping when the "sub-prime' debacle was in full swing, now pretend to know what formula will work; or, to be more accurate, they pretend to know that the Obama formula won't work, but, without saying just what would work. And so it goes.

For those out of work, it's going to be a bitch finding work that brings in money for food and shelter. In a couple months, some of the stimulus money ought to be having an impact, but, meanwhile, that's no comfort for the job seekers. Will this economic downturn become worse than a bad recession? I don't think anyone knows for sure. Will this nation become less dependent on debt financing? For awhile, I suppose. But, maybe with the increasing visibility of the long-term perils facing all peoples, there may be some sobering going on that might continue to be a strong strain in our culture.

The glaciers which serve as global water reservoirs are shrinking as the atmosphere becomes warmer. The rate of glacier recession is accelerating. Is it possible to inact measures that slow down the rise in global temperature to any significant degree? I doubt it. Water will continue to be a serious regional problem; ecological imbalance will bring all kinds of nasty disruptions in the ecosystems of grassland and forests, in addition to the problem of scarce water.

In just four days, Mr. Obama will have finished his 100 days as President. There will be much tooting of horns, but that's okay. Of course, the Republicans -- who got us in this mess -- will complain about irresponsible spending, etc., just the very thing that they were guilty of for eight years.

Will we muddle through the next four years? Will global warming lead to calamity? Will the good earth remain a good place for humans? Will our species survive in the long run? At the current rate of population growth, we'll be reaching seven billion in a few years. At the current rate of global warming, world population will begin to decline well before the end of this century, and it will not be a pretty picture.

I must admit that this world drama continues to hold everyone's attention. And this drama promises to be an unmistakable catharsis if not total and final denouement in mankind's unlikely rise from the swamps to Predator in Chief of the animal world. Who will be next? Ants, termites, or some unlikely plant like kudzu, or a virus that does everybody in as the final conqueror, who leaves nothing to conquer and thus nothing to sustain itself.

Right now, though, there is some awakening among the masses to give the Paul Revere's of our time a reluctant nod of approval for action to stem the tide. Too little too late is the most likely outlook, based on historical precedence. When the undeniable symptoms become too obvious to be ignored or even countered, the subsystems of water and rising atmospheric heat will conspire to ravage of ecological balances and the bottom line effect will be to disrupt all kinds of growth and harvest cycles. When these dislocations become too much to maintain civil order, even the rich with their bunker abodes will be hard pressed to remain upright in the crash of civilization's domino's.

It's no comfort for people of my generation to realize we won't be around to see the worst case scenarios. We'll all be gnashing our teeth and tearing our hair out as we cry out, "why, o why, didn't we do more, the take the threat to civilization seriously? Why o why did we not stand up and just holler our heads off? Why? Because we're civilized, right? Civilized folk mind their manners and we don't panic until it's too late.

Is it even too late to do that report Mr. Pant wants me to do?