I Live In The Future

Gazing at a world map, I'm challenged to say offhand, ah, yes, there's a primitive land still living in the past. Maybe a little village in Peru? A longhouse in Borneo? A lonely yurt in Mongolia?

When I was a child 50 years ago, it was easy to point at whole continents that were Undeveloped and living in the past. Modern medicine, motorised transport, telecommunication, ample food, clean water, sewage treatment and the miracle of leveraged finance was a monopoly of privilege confined to Western Europe and North America excluding most of Mexico. Enclaves in Australia and South Africa struggled with the paradox of two cultures separated by thousands of years.

Not any more. The world is blanketed with cheap cell phones and MTV. Approximately four billion people have been catapulted into a futuristic 21st century with instant access to the internet and a horizontal library of news and knowledge. The other two billion are making money on it.

Unfortunately, I seem to be stuck in the past. The only thing I can do with a 3G cellphone is say "Hello?" and occasionally dial a number. Except my phone doesn't have a rotary dial, just buttons. How does one make a telephone call these days? Is it digitally correct to say beep and boop?

I can't operate an i-Phone or Blackberry and don't want to try.

The future has ceased to be a literary caution. In America, every telephone conversation and e-mail message is monitored and archived by the government, ostensibly looking for bad guys, but mostly filling warehouses with an inarticulate scrawl beeped and booped by teenagers. Our warplanes are flown by remote control, and the chief threat to commercial aviation nowadays is a computer glitch.

I suppose it's traditional to elect a U.S. President on obviously empty slogans like "Yes We Can!" and "Change You Can Believe In." But it was inconceivable and impossible that a black man raised in Indonesia would sweep to power by rallying white voters in Iowa and Colorado. That his wife, the First Lady, would vacation in Spain by herself, occupying 30 rooms in a 5-star hotel, merely confirms the disconnect with whatever I once knew or thought I knew about the United States of America.

The USA that I remember led the world in mining and manufacturing.

"You serious? That ship left port a very long time ago. We lost the ability to manufacture most goods using domestic sources. You cannot find a domestic source for the vast majority of electronic components. Add in the lack of many strategic minerals or rare commodities and you got problems making any type of specialty metal or chemical. To rebuild the entire chain of component and material suppliers could take 20 years. Of course the cost of goods would scream up 5-10x what they are now. Pretty hard to handle when the consumer and businesses and leveraged to the hilt." [comment at Zero Hedge]

I would like to say that we live in historic times. But it's more accurate to call them unhistoric and unprecedented.

The United States has never before in its history found itself trapped in a debt spiral with zero percent wholesale rates merely the nominal tip of an iceberg. Graybeards like me found no joy in Q2 PMI statistics. Inventories are up, final sale prices down. Companies aren't hiring. They're hoarding cash.

Unemployment in America is a ghost ship that doesn't appear on the official radar. This year, two million young people entered the workforce with no college degree, no work experience, and no job prospects. Their parents are in even worse shape, splurging on i-Phones, Starbucks, and teeth whitening, without paying down mortgage debt or fat credit card balances.

Conservative Republicans, expecting to oust the party of Big Government in November, are headed for a mind-numbing shock. Obama and the Democrats are invincible. At best, grumpy shopkeepers and failed entrepreneurs might conceivably trim the Democrat majority in Congress. But it will be too little too late.

Oil men are aghast at passage of HR 3534, the so-called CLEAN energy bill that they hope to stall in the US Senate. I haven't counter Senate votes for or against the House package, but few senators have enough courage or constituents to fight a "clean energy" law.

Volkswagen, Toyota and GM are developing mass market electric vehicles. Passage of subsidies for uneconomic natural gas fleet conversion seems certain.

In a sense, this is a step backward to the energy policy outlined in the Carter Administration and long advocated by green activists. That's why I feel as if I'm living in the future, finally acknowledged after so much denial. America has cut its own throat. How quickly or slowly we bleed to death is a matter of monetary perspective.

Paul Krugman is right. Unless our government spends more and borrows more, the illusion of US economic growth will shatter again.

That's why fiscal conservatives have nothing to sell except pain, and they will lose in November.

I wish I could be more optimistic about America's competence and willingness to change her ways, but our fiasco in Afghanistan says it all. The United States spends lavishly on ephemeral, impossible fairy tale promises.

Opium and hopium production is up.

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