Debt and Dämmerung: Welcome to the Wasteland
Automatic Earth

As the US and the world at large are -very- slowly waking up to the reality of the biggest single man made environmental disaster in history (by Three Miles and a half), and in all likelihood the biggest one in the history of the planet, we can see a striking similarity between the way news of the Deepwater Horizon destruction reaches us and how we've been and still are (not!) being force-fed the true scope and impact of the single biggest financial crisis in time immemorial.

Modus operandi: Extend and pretend, lie and deny, cheat, rinse and repeat. We're caught in a self-hand-made trap of never-ending attempts to bend what's real into what's non-offensive to palates shaped by processed food and minds formed by advertisement campaigns aimed exclusively at the sub-conscious. And we can blame all the politicians, spin doctors and marketeers for all we want, but in the end they're just showing us who we really are. If that wasn't true, they'd try another tack to sell us the detergents, trinkets and presidents they have on offer.

As the incomparable Joe Bageant phrases it in Hologram, carry me home,

This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape.

BP, Transocean and Halliburton, the three main players in causing the free-for all mass-murder gusher, aided and abetted by the US government, have nothing left of what could and should have been a common sense of concern and responsibility for the consequences of their failures on the world and its inhabitants. Instead, they spend every dime and minute of their time, money and effort trying to avoid the blame. They no longer show any signs of having a grasp on reality; these have been replaced by a worldview that's squarely focused on their bottom lines.

The egrets, WC Fields' bottlenose dolphins, Kemp's Ridleys turtles and even fishermen that are left out there on the tar-and-feathered Gulf of Mexico coast don't have the luxury of escaping into a hologram or snow globe. They're just dying. And no matter how many well-meaning dedicated souls lose their sleep trying to clean oil covered feathers, a spill the size of an Exxon-Valdez every few days to a week, with no end in sight, will render their habitat uninhabitable for a very long time to come.

So how does America react? In perfect snow globe fashion, a judge in Alaska rules that Shell can launch its offshore drilling programs in the Arctic. Shell's take: "we spent billions already, and haven't made a dime yet". That's like the BP spin spokesman reacting to reports that the oil leak may spout 70.000 barrels per day instead of BP's 5000 barrel estimate: "We are focused on stopping the leak and not measuring it".

Really, you want me to believe you had no idea how much you were producing there ahead of the explosion, you had no clue of the pressure at all?

Prosecutions of the perpetrators, while sure to be endlessly drawn out public spectacles the likes of which we haven't seen in years, can't undo what's already been done. There, too, lies a glaring similarity with what's going on in the world of finance. The SEC, various Attorney Generals and all the justice departments America has, can file as many criminal cases as they want against Wall Street. The world, the country and its states are still broke. Very broke. We just haven't been told yet, at least not through official channels. Our brains are still stuck on or inside the Möbius loop.

If we glance through the litany of austerity measures voted in and proposed in Greece, Ireland, California, Portugal, New Jersey, Spain and New York State, we should pause for a moment to think about the effect of 5-10-15% salary cuts and of slashed healthcare programs for the poor and elderly, but most of all of what still lies ahead. What will be the result for various GDP numbers from all the pay-cuts. What will happen when the next 10-20% cuts are implemented. And then see that in the light of how all budgets are still based on ever-over-optimistic data about economic growth, recovery and stabilizing real estate prices.

For those reasons, California's recent and bitterly contested budget can be thrown out already. Next up: fund-raising campaigns among the rich (hence: no new taxes) and health cuts for the Golden State poor, whose epitaphs shall read: "The Terminator was Here". Arnold himself, by the way, is also closing his term. He's out of here, and no, "he won't be back". If he's got any sense left, that is.

And no, it's not just Sacramento or Athens or Lisbon, the torn and frayed denial phase has grown old and weary. They are just the advance-screening theaters of a production more broadly distributed than the best planned Hollywood ad campaign. This feature will not just come to a theater near you, it will come to a street, a home, a family near you. Even if you're lucky enough to escape the worst of it financially, you still can't escape. And this time you'll be caught up in the matrix, the möbius and the hologram of reality. What if you're fine, but your family, friends and neighbors are not? What are you going to do? Lock the door and cancel that trip to Florida or Louisiana? Where's your food going to come from? From the store that just saw 80% of its customers' pay cut by 20%+? You have any idea how narrow the profit margins are in that line of business?

We can't help ourselves, dear fellow hominids. We spend so much time bullshitting other people about who we are and what and how we're doing that we can no longer help but believing our own riveting lying-ass tales. Only, this time around, in the world outside the matrix, the snow globe and the Möbius strip, the economy is no longer growing, and the river doesn't clean itself every 10 miles anymore -as Mark Twain wrote 150-odd years ago-. And as everyone around us will get poorer fast, so will we. By default. You probably never realized it, but you have just entered the wasteland. Enjoy your stay.

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