On the ‘Necessity’ of Throwing U.S. Budget Gutter Balls

As a candidate Barack Obama famously bowled a gutter ball filled score of 37. He bowled a score of zero as President failing to veto the Bush era tax cuts renewal last December. He set a new standard for Democratic mediocrity that F.D. Roosevelt and maybe even Bill Clinton would have regarded as unacceptable. Mediocrity in budgeting is no new thing for America today.

Are names not something of inflexible descriptions of unique events or unique sets of attributes of events-even the name ‘America’? What is America? Is it a particular historical concept, a geographical locality, or some sort of variable political identifier denoting sovereignty and a host of other qualities? A name may be a meaning rather than an address. What is meant by ‘America’ may change in time to anything at all, from good to bad.

We might prefer to regard Latinos as a hybrid race better named for Amerigo Vespucci than a minor Roman district named Latia, yet Americans too are what we called citizens of the United States of America because of the awkwardness of calling them Unionists.

American unions have certainly been in decline along with the real income of white men in the U.S.A. since 1971. The U.S. broadcast media has become a servo-unit of global corporatism along with both major political parties of the nation since the end of the cold war. The U.S.A. has a progressive national public debt set to reach 20 trillion dollars by the end of a second possible Obama administration. Public education standards are in comparative decline along with the U.S. standard of living in comparison to the gross national product increases of the second world. One may wonder why, and also wonder if a necessary mediocrity has overtaken the U.S.A. and destined it to a mediocre future not as a leading nation but as an also ran amongst nations trying to lead.

What made the United States a great economic power many have asked? A heritage of a vast under populated continent full of natural resources and an immigrant people of Europe able to exploit the best scientific and technical ideas of Europe and world history in a rich natural frontier with the absence of an hereditary ruling class. The absence of any kind of oppressive social organizations and the low national population density permitted uninhibited intellectual freedom to invent, apply, innovate and adapt ideas to real production. Freedom fro government or private organizations of a ubiquitous or oppressive presence and intellectual and physical room for growth let the brilliance of man and women create such works as they were able to conceive. The intellectual and physical liberty was the necessary condition for economic excellence.

With the nation full with more than 300 million people and immigrants of an illegal rather than a legal nature predominantly, and with the number of inventors comparatively in decline along with the U.S.A. as a destination far removed from oppressive social organizations the United States seems to be moving into a protracted era of mediocrity even though commercial space ventures are increasing.

Wall Street is about global investment and owners more so than national. The prosperous find the silly little borders nothing in technical considerations beyond those of taxation. Telecommunications have eliminated planetary distance and the nation itself is regarded as just one place amidst a world of locations in which corporate and government partners might invest. If nearly 20% of Americans can’t find enough work to sustain a fair living, well, that’s helpful for controlling labor costs.

The United States has become saturated in social networking simultaneously with pervasive business networking. Data acquisition and processing records volumes on the life of every individual American, and ‘liberal’ race, gender and sexual perversion classes have transitioned to leadership of political power as the counterfactual interpretation of corporate led economics. Americans seem determined to make the nation just one mediocre, average society amidst a new world order of Wal-Marts, asphalt streets, cell phones and financial related services. The idea of reconstructing the United States economically into a new low entropy, full employment, self-reliant leading example to the rest of the world of a free society with a stable population reasonably able to venture into space development while restoring the health of the ecosphere is a political goal of virtually no one. Excellence for the United States as a nation seems to fail to reach the public video attention. The nation must descend into protracted mediocrity to expand into a global economy before fading away.

Adam Smith; the brilliant 18the century economist, described a method whereby individual entrepreneurs were better benefiting themselves and society without the oppression of a powerful social organization. In his day that organization was the state. In today’s business environment and pervasive, even totalitalized geographic saturation oppressive organizations are not limited to government, but exist in the concatenated Wall Street extended corporate network as well. Individual Americans experience the corporate/market political way ubiquitous from ATM machines to rft strips between sheets of book binding.

Americans develop class consciousness as youth, elderly, white, black, straight, homosexual, Christian, pagan, middle class, Democrat, republican, Latino far more so than as individuals. Existential and borderless principles of class leveling mediocrity over individual efforts and excellence prevail in the marketplace, consumerism, in ‘reality’ T.V. and budget negotiations in Congress. An economic philosophy of market personal egoism in mass portionality transcended real geographic and/or intellectual individualism.

For the ascent of class consumer values and for its justification the inertia of global mass consumerism and corporate ‘market’ economics has developed velocity. The coefficient of mass consumerism and the logic of hedonistic mediocrity are challenging to overcome with interpolations of individual pursuit of excellence. Perhaps the logic of brilliant individual minds pursuing the good for the nation can emerge like a light in the darkness now and then, yet the occasional illumination may not be enough for the people of the United States to emerge from the night of the underworld that may lie ahead.