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A Recession Only Steinbeck Could Love
Rachel Dry, Washington Post
There's nothing like a Great Recession to make people want to read about the Great Depression.

Seventy years after John Steinbeck published his best-selling tale of the Joad family's journey from Oklahoma to California along Route 66, "The Grapes of Wrath," required reading that never really went out of style, is suddenly in high demand.

... So what would Steinbeck say about all this?

... The answer, though, isn't exactly a salve to our overleveraged wounds.

Steinbeck would think that we're getting just what we deserve. And he'd like it.

Not because the Nobel laureate and best-selling author would wish misfortune upon his fellow citizens. But because, first of all, he romanticized the essential moral goodness that springs from adversity, and second, because he hated the material bloat of postwar America. He just didn't like stuff. And now that we are brought low by stuff, acquiring it without really paying for it, devising complex financial instruments to get more of it, he'd think that maybe we're ready to learn a lesson or two.

Rereading Steinbeck today -- not the compassionate chronicler of human struggle Steinbeck of the 1930s but the cantankerous social critic Steinbeck of the 1950s and '60s -- is a little eerie. If only we'd listened to him, we might not have spent our way in to the current crisis. Of course, in the aftermath of disaster, anyone who punctured enthusiasms with vague harbingers of doom can seem retroactively brilliant. But listen to Steinbeck on the American obsession with things: "If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick."
(22 March 2009)

Full Commanding Denial
James Howard Kunstler, blog
If central casting called for a poised, straight-talking, and capable-seeming president, it would be hard to come up with someone better than the Barack Obama who walked and talked around the White House grounds with Steve Croft on "60-Minutes" Sunday night. He may perfectly represent the majority who elected him, though, because he also appears to be in full commanding denial of the realities overtaking our American experience.

Those realities include the fact that we can't possibly return to the easy credit and no money down "consumer" economy no matter how many nominal dollars get shoveled into the fiery furnaces of banks too-big-to-fail. As Treasury Secretary Geithner's underling, Stephanie Cutter, said last week, "Our singular focus is on increasing lending to support economic recovery. Everything we do to stabilize the financial system is done with that goal in mind."

Lending on the scale that became normal over the last decade is for sure the one thing that we will not recover. We turn around in 2009 to find ourselves a much poorer nation than we thought we were a year ago, especially among that broad range of formerly middle-class wage-earners who lived so luxuriously until yesterday. The public can't process this reality and the president, for all his relaxed charm, is either not ready to articulate it, or can't process it himself.

Everything that we're doing right now is engineered to avoid reality, to sustain the unsustainable, to recover the unrecoverable, when the mandate of reality compels us to face our losses in order to move on to the next chapter of a collective American life. The next chapter would be a society that runs on a much more local and modest scale, centered on essential activities like growing food, requiring harder physical work, and focused attention -- in other words, the opposite of a society lost in abstractions, long-range daisy chains of off-loaded responsibility, and incessant pleasure-seeking.
(23 March 2009)
Jim Kunstler's blog has a new photo with the author sporting a mustache. -BA

The Big Takeover
Matt Tabibi, Rolling Sonte
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
(19 March 2009)
Recommended by Big Gav at Peak Energy. He writes:
Matt Tabibi is still doing a good job as Hunter S Thompson's successor at Rolling Stone, with some choice phrases in this look at the credit crunch and the waning days of America's empire.

"Climate Change 'Big Priority' For Energy Commission Chief"
Steven Mufson, Washington Post
"Add a new name to the list of Obama appointees devoted to aggressive action on climate change.

President Obama yesterday named Jon Wellinghoff -- a lawyer who once served as Nevada's consumer advocate and a believer that electric-car owners could someday get paid to provide backup battery power to the electricity grid -- as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Wellinghoff joined the commission in 2006 and has been serving as acting chairman since January. He takes charge of an agency that has long been dominated by oil and gas or utility lawyers and that focuses on the wholesale part of the oil, natural gas and electricity markets. The agency oversees about 368,000 miles of electricity transmission lines and more than 11,000 miles of natural gas pipelines, and regulates hydroelectric projects and energy markets."
(21 March 2009)