It’s hard to predict the future, it’s even harder to predict what is going on during at any given present. Now that the professionals are beginning to balk at ‘recovery’ any time soon, the attention is directed toward the Gulf of Mexico again. Americans are desperate for any sort of good news that pushes them back to the malls and box stores.

Does she or doesn’t she …

is she still leaking or not? When is a leak not a leak? There are certainly hydrocarbon emissions from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico but these are rationalized as ‘natural seeps’. This is BP shill- speak, the whole Macondo debacle is no doubt a natural seep.

Just bad luck that Transocean just happened to be ‘practice drilling’ in this same, exact area! Nobody knows what happened to that original ‘exploratory’ well and BP isn’t saying. Maybe Matt Simmons is right and the whole BP ‘effort’ at the so- called Macondo well head is a dog- and- pony show.

This parallels the onrush of BP- company hired liars on internet message boards ready and eager to absolve BP of any responsibility, pushing what remains toward ‘circumstances beyond anyone’s control’. This PR ‘top kill’ of accomplishes as little as the pathetic junk shot attempted on the well earlier in June. Garbage in, garbage out; it feeds into the rising perception that everything about modern life is fixed in someone else’s favor. This tactic is all that remains to the Obama administration which has exhibited far more than its share of ineptitude. Everything is broken, even the almighty Feds are out of good answers.

Why isn’t FEMA running this show instead of the Department of (atomic) Energy?

The enveloping question is why defend the indefensible? This is a cultural issue rather one of engineering or policy. It manifests itself elsewhere as the public participation is amorphous, like air in a balloon.

The balloon squeezed at one end expands at the other; it is too little too late in the squeezing game as the American Public are voting with their feet, paying down credit lines and closing accounts (or getting them closed down by their lenders). Looking at the news of today, now, the present … all that news is bad: residential real estate sales are crashing (despite trillions of added subsidies), millions more are headed into foreclosure, retail sales are now dropping, overnight interbank rates are rising while longer Treasury yields are dropping, more euro countries are poised at the brink, Eurozone auto registrations are dropping …

The almighty automobile, the source of the Eurozone’s income but its scourge; the euro- region’s poorest economic performers – Ireland, Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy – are also its greatest energy debtors as well.

Like the ‘maybe, maybe- not’ gusher in the Gulf, nobody can see it if they can’t look in the right place. The zeitgeist is for the establishment to make sure nobody does: it’s not Hyman Minsky’s Ponzi Dynamic, at the root of the problem, it’s sleazy Times Square’s three- card monte dynamic! By controlling access to the correct information, nobody can envision ‘real’. What remains is a vacuum, filled with lies and marketing.

Reality may as well not exist. This is quite an existential accomplishment!

Even if Thad Allen and BP are telling God’s honest truth along with Goldman- ‘I Didn’t Steal That Dude’s Money’ Sachs, nobody believes them unless they can see with their own eyes!

 

All a fraud, in other words.

The Great Depression was both a finance crisis as well as a social and cultural crisis. In the 1930’s the developed world was torn between continuing community- level economic activities that had sustained the United States for 150 years – and the rest of the world for centuries – or embrace the ‘New’ Big Business commercial/industrial model that had emerged at the turn of the 20th century. By 1929, the excesses of capitalist monopolies had shattered the virtuous self- funding cycle that promised unlimited prosperity on one hand, but delivered it with the other to the monopolists’ themselves. The outcome was a smoldering revolt of the public vs. the rentiers. This was the ‘real’ great depression; a revolution that has continued in fits and starts to this very day.

The conflict was pitiless. Individuals and families were shattered by unemployment, foreclosure and default, by the confiscation of savings and assets as well as coopted by the promise of automobiles and an evanescent ‘mobility’. Businesses were rendered insolvent by the repudiation of credit, ruinous competition and by the destruction of commerce by hard currency. it was begun decades before the Great War as the monopolists’ assault on their own customers which became a severe recession when the swindled resisted with the only tool the barons left to them.

That being the willingness of the little people to hold onto their money and give it value over the frauds promoted by the monopolists. The public at great cost to themselves abandoned the speculative casinos, the flim-flammery, the bezzles, the fictions, the frauds, the ‘investment opportunities’. The public ignored the ‘Show Biz’ and in the lengthening shadows capital’s minions and their blandishments began to vanish, as if they were fairies or leprechauns.

Here are parallels with both the ‘austerity’ and the ‘walking away’ of the present. What is visible and what is real in this now, present today is the rekindling of the Great Depressionary Revolution of the powerless against their erstwhile finance masters.

By 1940 the country was exhausted, capital was a hollowed ruin; Roosevelt forced capital’s remnants to compete with a new ‘Deal’ of wage and service benefits that neutralized the leverage over labor that monopolies first, then deflation later granted to capital.

Unfortunately, the well- meaning (?) US government shifted to the side of the capital interests again: needing their ‘innovations’ to produce the trucks, airplanes and ships necessary to fight World War Two. Given a reprieve, the capital monopolies after the war became more avaricious and powerful than ever; kept in check only by the discipline of post- war organized labor and a finance sector shrunken by both the depression and the New Deal. Once finance was liberated by Thatcher/Reaganism and the flood of debt- creation during the 1980’s the monopolists rapidly regained the advantage over their customers that they enjoyed from the Gilded Age through the Roaring Twenties.

Now, we Americans have a sham government with sham laws to ‘protect’ us from those which the government itself has elevated to supremacy over us. We now have toothless finance reform that stops short of protecting US service personnel and their families from the depredation of car dealers and pawnshops. This stands alongside the toothless healthcare reform that pads insurance company and Big- pharma dividends. This stands next to a massive (and unending) series of bailouts of the same finance monopolies that amplified the credit crisis to begin with.

The new/old war thus begins anew: Americans are walking away from their debts, in the process giving the finger to bloated oligarchs and their Washington lackeys. As day follows night, the outcome will be another crisis. This too shall be a quiet and fiercely desperate revolution of the dispossessed against the monopolists.

Like the earlier depression, this will also be a cultural crossing, a choice to be taken either toward James Kunstler’s world made by hand or a machine- driven armageddon, where every last tree, every lump of coal, every drop of oil and water and ultimately ourselves entirely are sacrificed to a bankrupt notion of ‘progress’.

The big lie of ‘progress’ which is all that capital has left to sell. Once it’s gone there is nothing to offer. It’s going; when the only oil left is a mile under the ocean any dreams of a utopian Futurama are just that …

As for BP, what is left for them? Let them drill for oil on the Moon.