Biggest event taking place right this instant isn’t any of the world’s melt-downs but rather the theatrical release of Ayn Rand’s stupefying bore- fest … what is the name of that movie again?

Hmmm … spending hard- earned real money to watch a movie about well- dressed jackasses pretending to obtain industrial societies’ fetish objects is as interesting as watching a movie about somebody mowing grass. A bizarre form of desperate self- loathing — voyeurism — is required in order to accept the undertaking on its own terms. It’s after- the- fact propaganda of a fabulist sort. You’d see the English making this kind of movie: Miss Marple would be drinking tea, ferreting out the corpse in a drawing room in a chintz- filled manor house populated with dithering, yet endearing eccentrics.

In America the corpse is on a bloody rampage. Here is the vision of decadent American Exceptionalism rotting before the viewers’ eyes. Rand’s conceit is that society is obligated to the baronesque ‘Uberman’ parasites who feed off of it. Rationalizations never had it so good: the ‘Niewe Corruption’ which pretends it isn’t requires people to rip off others so as to afford seeing a movie about ripping people off. Who is John Galt, again?

Does anyone care?

The production company cut half of the film: here are some bits of the other half on YouTube:

The viewers can come to their own conclusions about which version of Exceptionalism is more representative of reality. Both have their merits, one seamlessly integrates with the other. Both orbit around a fantasy of capitalism: the wanderer appears to be the mute and mysterious Galt, stopping at a vending machine in order to purchase a flamethrower, presumably with The American Express Gold Card.

Doctor Challes Mercer’s ‘creation’ is an indestructible humoresque which — unlike Mimi in La Boheme — reconstitutes itself after dismemberment over and over. It’s not hard to make the connection between this Rand alter- ego and Exxon or Monsanto or any/all other zombie- corporations that are to be found nowhere in particular. What’s missing is the purchase of Washington, DC ‘power factors’ by this entity with bags of dirty money exchanged under the table(s). Meanwhile, Galt’s ‘lifestyle’ is to endure as a rat in a dystopic automobile habitat confronted with those who desire nothing but to make him one of ‘them’.

The only thing missing from the clip is the traffic jam at the beginning and end as Galt commutes to and from his baleful ‘office’.

The message that our entertainment provides for us with upturned hearts and hopeful minds is conflicted. ‘Atlas Shrugs’ suggests that workmanlike virtues such as ability, skill, mastery are irrelevancies left to the pathetic, fucked- over ‘little people’: what matters is the broad- shouldered ‘attitude’ on the part of the deserving.

‘Shrugs Part Two’ suggests a machine gun and good reflexes are indispensable. It’s tough when a video game starring a wanderer in a giant space ship is more ‘real’ than reality itself. When in doubt, whip it out: the country along with the rest of developed world has never left the second grade!

Meredith Whitney whips it out while kicking the US municipal bond market in the balls on national television. The response by the broad- shouldered, business- suited crowd is Randian outrage! The muni interloper Whitney has some nerve: after all, municipal bond issuers have rarely defaulted. Because municipalities have not defaulted in the past they certainly won’t default in the future! Right?

Keep in mind municipal bonds are bets on the viability of sprawl in the age of rapidly diminishing expectations … er, fuel supplies.

Rand acolyte Chris Cristie who is the putative governor of New Jersey whips it out in the same clip and whales teachers and firefighters over the head in the hunt for easy answers. While the problem with the US economy is the exceptionalism parked at the end of folks’ driveways, it feels good to whip out sixteen inches or so of Randistic gristle and bash those not responsible for the fallout. Key to the Ayn Rand philosophy is the identification of scapegoats!

In a ground-breaking statement last week, the IMF says oil has entered, “a period of increased scarcity.”

Energy constraints turn our atavistic economic Darwinism inside out. Any ‘growth’ or ‘progress’ or buzzword larded bubble- creation on the parts of the Ayn Rand crowd is accompanied by its profit- killing oil- price doppelganger, which replicates itself along- and across supply chains. Prices become serial killers stalking the barren economic landscape like vampires. Tom Whipple whips it out and flogs the denial crowd with Peak Oil Reality:

Unlike the price spike of three years ago, when oil prices climbed from $70 a barrel in late 2007 to a peak of $147 in July 2008 and then collapsed to less than $60 a barrel by the end of the year, this time prices have been moving steadily higher since March of 2010. Much has happened since the 2008 oil price spike that has left the U.S. and global economies different places than they were three years ago.

The bursting of the housing and financial bubbles and the subsequent government bailouts in many OECD countries left most governments at all levels in dire straits. Unemployment rates in many OECD countries have risen and for many incomes have fallen considerably as workers have been forced into lower paying jobs. Polls suggest that as many as 50 percent of American families have had some sort of financial setback in recent years.

Into this milieu we now have added higher oil prices. Moreover, given the increasing unrest in many Middle Eastern states, continued robust economic growth in China and India, and despite the deterioration of Japan’s economy in the midst of its tsunami/nuclear radiation crisis, it seems the balance of forces driving the oil markets will result in still higher prices before the year is out.

Now this is a message that the world’s financial markets and chambers of commerce simply do not want to hear, for it implies that in the not too distant future there will be another economic downturn. In recent days there has been a spate of stories in the financial press trying to make the case that all is not lost and that economic recovery will continue despite increasing energy costs.

The presumably Rand-u-esque Standard and Poors Rating Agency whipped it out recently and announced US credit is not up to S&P’s exceedingly high standards.

U.S. Credit Rating May Be Cut by S&P Unless Lawmakers Agree to Reduce Debt

Standard & Poor’s put the U.S. government on notice that it risks losing its AAA credit rating unless policy makers agree on a plan by 2013 to reduce budget deficits and the national debt.

“If an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation does not begin by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns,” New York-based S&P said today in a report that maintained its top rating on U.S. long-term debt while lowering the outlook to “negative” for the first time.

The rating agencies have zero- credibility. S&P gave its benedictions to Enron and then to CDO’s backed by unserviceable mortgages during the credit bubble. “J-accuse!” howl the Rand- tagonists: Here’s Dave Lindorff (HT Jesse’s Cafe Americain)

An ‘Oh Please!’ Moment: Is S&P Running Interference for the Right to Help Crush Social Security and Medicare?

Today’s breathless, anxiety-inducing headline was that Standard and Poors, the rating agency, has issued a “negative outlook” warning on US sovereign debt, claiming that the US, in comparison with other countries with a top AAA credit rating, has “very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us”. S&P warned that there was a “a one in three chance that the US could lose its AAA rating in two years because of its mounting debt.”

The ratings firm–one of three global companies that Wall Street relies upon to establish the credit ratings of companies and nations around the world–said its analysts had “little confidence” that the Obama administration and the divided Congress would reach any agreement on a deficit-reduction plan before the next national election in the fall of 2012, and that they doubted that any such plan would be adopted until after 2014, two whole Congressional elections away.

So far, the other two ratings agencies, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings, have not followed suit. Moody’s issued a statement saying, ““Moody’s rating for the US is Aaa and remains stable,” though the company warns that “an upward debt trajectory and increasing fiscal pressures could increase the likelihood of an “outlook change” within “the next two years.”

At least one economist burst out laughing on hearing about the S&P announcement. “They did what?” exclaimed James Galbraith, a professor of economics at he University of Texas in Austin, who formerly served as executive director of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. “This is remarkable! It certainly will confirm the suspicions of those who have questioned S&P’s competence after its performance on the mortgage debacle.”

Warning, Jesse is a dollar bear. As for Galbraith, he points out the Fed can simply write a check to pay off the obligation. This is indeed true, but there are consequences to the US writing lots of checks to pay off all the obligations which is what Galbraith dares not mention.

It is different this time: we are on the energy downslope and the output necessary to retire our massive debts simply does not exist.

“Political shenanigans cannot be ruled out,” says Galbraith. “That’s what lawyers would call the ‘rebuttable presumption.’ After all, who benefits? The Republicans and perhaps the banks. But of course the other possibility is that S&P doesn’t know what it’s talking about, and after their disastrous missing of the mortgage bubble, that’s quite possibly what it is.”

The Obama administration, for its part, has reacted with surprising restraint to the S&P bombshell, saying only that the administration expects to reach an agreement with Congress over how to reduce the nation’s debt. Mary Miller, assistant treasury secretary for financial markets, for her part said that S&P “underestimates the ability of America’s leaders to come together to address the difficult fiscal challenges facing the nation.”

How pathetic is that? How about a call for the SEC, or the Federal Reserve or the Attorney General to investigate whether S&P was improperly pressured to issue its absurd “negative warning”? How about a call in the Senate for hearings to look into any such possible improper political pressure?

I’m not suggesting that there are no consequences for the failure of the US political system to pay for the nation’s trillions of dollars in wars, or for its craven preference over the last 30 years to hand tax cuts to corporations and the rich while continuing to encourage corporations to shift their investments abroad, taking the nation’s jobs with them. There will surely come a reckoning. But it won’t be in the form of default.

High fuel costs and high credit/money costs feed back into each other but the issue is not the feedback but the costs themselves. The robber barons look to shift these to ‘others’ by any means available: with little concern whether these others can bear the costs being shifted. Like it or not, the default is there: what is missing is any reality behind the assumption of resumed ‘growth’ which is required to service and retire extraordinary debts.

The post- modern finance crisis: our shit costs more than it’s worth. Simple, right? Tom Engelhardt whips it out and bashes the policy side of shifting costs overseas by way of the Pentagon:

Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark

What It Feels Like When a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks

This can’t end well.

But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose.

Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there’s something distant and abstract about the patterns of history. It’s quite another thing to take it in when you’re part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you’re in the belly of the beast.

I don’t know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet Empire before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this — truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad.

The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn’t sense that the sun is now setting on us?

Not so many years ago, we were proud enough of our global strength to regularly refer to ourselves as the Earth’s “sole superpower.” In those years, our president and his top officials dreamed of establishing a worldwide Pax Americana, while making speeches and issuing official documents proclaiming that the United States would be militarily “beyond challenge” by any and all powers for eons to come. So little time has passed and yet who speaks like that today? Who could?

Fukushima’s nuclear debacle is the consequence of shifting costs from oil fields to reactors. The risk curves are different, but making the shift did not eliminate either the costs or the risks.

What we are left with is an establishment stumbling along like Mercer’s humoresque, groping for easy answers. The same broad- shouldered, sneering ‘Greed is Good’ ‘tude’ which has worked so well in the past is now useless. Some suggest a gold standard, or firing union workers or getting rid of the Fed, more stimulus/pump- priming, whatever … None of these quick fixes are going to accomplish anything without $20 per barrel crude which is lost and gone forever! There are no more easy answers, no ‘Triumph of the Will’, no Ubermanner or comic book heroes to fill up the starship gas tank. ‘Honest’ and ‘Money’ are simply two meaningless words, that money itself is a store of ‘nothing’ because industrialization’s fetishes are worthless out of industry’s ‘Superman’ context.

That context being mindless waste for the ‘fun’ and tailfins and car- hop stupidity of it all. With the context evaporated, exceptionalism is sound and fury signifying nothing performed on the corroded deck of a ghost (space) ship vanishing into a storm.