Turning and turning

We are told repeatedly by our rulers in business, politics and the media that the big hurdle to addressing climate change and health care is cost. Somehow war without end, the global effects of climate change and the towering costs of health care even as more Americans do without it are "free." And so it goes.

This is how we live now. There was indeed one conservative in last fall's presidential election and he now sits in the White House. Barack Obama fits the Burkean mold of slow change, respectful of tradition and custom, seeking to preserve the best of existing arrangements. Unfortunately, thirty years of right-wing revolution (represented by Mr. Obama's opponent, the wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III) have driven these laudable benchmarks so far to the extreme that Mr. Obama's innate restraint is exactly the wrong temperament for this pivotal moment in history.

On health care, one wonders if his heart was ever in it. This has been a colossal failure of the Democratic Party. The New Deal was not the product of a single, 2,000-plus page bill, but of scores of pieces of legislation over years. It delivered nearly instant relief to the nation's suffering, in both substance and confidence-building, helping to ensure continued Democratic majorities to keep it going. Under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, we have a massive dog's breakfast that will come to no good, and be undone by the Republicans because its good elements will take too long to kick in. Why, for example, not one bill that outlawed the savage practice of denying insurance based on pre-existing conditions, or charging outlandish premiums for it — and having it implemented the moment the president signed the legislation? Another could have instantly required pharmaceutical companies to bid for Medicare drugs, lowering costs at the stroke of a pen. Yet another would have eliminated antitrust protections for the big insurers. And another still would have been a public option, if not Medicare for all — and let the filibuster happen and its instigators pay the fearsome price in the next election.

Instead, we have a huge encyclopedia of a bill dripping with sinister self-interest for big insurance and big pharma — to essentially get huge taxpayer subsidies while continuing their lethally obscene business model. It does produce the profits to buy a Congress.

This should be no surprise. The bailout of Wall Street spent potentially trillions of dollars to protect most of the very players that brought on the crash, demanding no reforms on their part. The actual stimulus part of the so-called stimulus bill went to "shovel ready" projects that are conveniently profitable for the politically powerful driving-sprawl industries (same with "cash for clunkers" and the first-time house-buyer tax credit). And the illogical, doomed Afghanistan escalation just happens to be very good business for one of America's last productive major homegrown industries: defense contractors. It turns out we do indeed have a jobs program, an economic stimulus and an industrial policy: war.

Those hoping for a genuine break with the destructive, unsustainable policies of the past are the road kill of this season of discontent. The Great Panic of last fall was arrested too soon to shatter the hold on power of the old order. It doesn't even have to be the result of a quiet coup or a shadow government. It can merely be the result, as in Arizona, of a community of interests united in their opposition to anything that seems to threaten their profits and power. Thus, the biggest single effort that would have created permanent good jobs and industries — building high-speed rail, enhancing and providing a permanent revenue stream for Amtrak, and building and providing permanent funding for transit — simply will not happen in America. We'll study it: a windfall to still another group of political contributors.

Which brings us to Copenhagen, where world leaders will gather this week to discuss a response to climate change. This will be another chance for the flat-earth movement to get publicity in otherwise sober American publications. We will hear of targets on emissions that kick the can down the road. And we will read about various schemes to get fuel from grass, algae, wind turbines and solar panels, as we await the magical hydrogen panacea that can't be far behind. Few will discuss the actual efficacy of these technologies, or how much precious crude oil each will consume in its making to produce a disappointing output of new energy. Even fewer will discuss the biggest problem: automobiles. In America, we're determined to not even give most people convenient options other than driving. And, we are told, this "proves" Americans don't want trains and transit. Big coal, the utilities and the auto/sprawl axis are already gearing up to defeat any meaningful climate-change legislation here — they have watched the health care "debate" and learned well.

Behind the scenes, of course, different world players are going their own ways. China has massive environmental problems, but it is also racing to build bullet trains, subways and corner renewable energy technologies — even as it uses soft diplomatic and money power to line up oil supplies. Europe is already well ahead on alternatives to the car and a lifestyle that is much more sustainable and scalable than in America. The American "lifestyle" may be "non-negotiable," as both former Vice President Cheney and President Obama agree. But the suburban and exurban spree dependent on single-occupancy car trips to Wal-Marts and office "parks" has been heavily subsidized from the start, was a key driver of the crash, and its costs will be ever more difficult to handle.

While we are mired in debt from sustaining the unsustainable, our competitors are moving ahead. And our rulers can tell us there's no money for research or good schools or good jobs. Those are the breaks. In a nation of 300 million people, what does it matter if 47 million are without health insurance, or 600,000 will be kicked off Aetna's rolls because they're…sick…, or you suffer and die in isolation? We're a Christian nation, a culture of life, the shining city on a hill where the "free market" decides such things.

The president has become a more avid golfer, perhaps the most striking symbol of his utter oneness with the existing power structure. The reliable friend of the bankers, the U.S. Chamber, the defense lobby. Maybe Hillary Clinton would have done better, but the example of her husband's presidency is not encouraging. In any event, this widening gyre of the Great Disruption is not over. Many are living it with real unemployment at 17.5 percent and the cratering middle class. Some, at least, sense it in the greed-driven dismemberment of the wealth — not only economic but civic and social — that it took a century to create, and the ongoing theft from posterity. We will see it in the retribution to come for our failure to prepare for discontinuity, a merciless reality, which, as Jim Kunstler has said, doesn't care what our delusional expectations may be. And in the increasing number of people who supported President Obama and now will say, "Why vote?" It is producing an extremely potent and volatile environment. A Republican takeover of Congress in 2010 will only be the beginning of its consequences.