The State of the Union Address That We Should Hear

Below are the words I would expect to hear from an honest, clear thinking, and knowledgeable POTUS. Of course it is easy to predict that the actual address will sound nothing like this, except possibly in veiled innuendo. That isn't because Obama isn't honest, or tries to be. It is because he is not clear thinking and he is definitely not knowledgeable about the things that are going to matter the most in the coming years.

The actual speech could be very short:

We're in deep do-do. Until you folks finally wake up from your delusional dreams of grandeur and figure out that drastic work is needed to salvage anything that might be recognized as civilization my hands are tied. I haven't the power to act because of the nature of our so-called democracy and the fact that it has become a corporatocracy (verging on fascism). As long as you folks continue shopping at WalMart and drive 20 miles or more to work and attend NASCAR races and think all of that is good, I am unable to do anything. Except I might invoke martial law when TSHTF! The end.

OK. Perhaps a more dignified and insightful version, spoken to thoughtful people who, themselves, are knowledgeable, would go like this [I wouldn't expect much applause every time he finished a sentence!]:

My fellow citizens of the world, and my fellow Americans. The state of the union reflects the state of the globe as a whole, and I am sorry to report that that is not good.

In spite of our best early hopes, when my administration took over the reins of government, the world economy has grown worse in this last year. It is true that there are pockets of seeming prosperity growth, such as China. And there are isolated bits of the economy in the US that are seeming to prosper, the financial industry, for the moment, seems to be doing well.

But these few examples are anomalies in a general trend of contraction and depression in the larger picture. China's prosperity is only relative against a background of formerly much lower incomes. And not every citizen in that huge country is prospering in the way that the happy few in the major urban centers seem to be doing. The jury is still out on China's ability to maintain its current high growth rate, and I will explain why later.

As far as financial markets and their seeming pull back from the brink of disaster, I must now admit that I made a horrible mistake when I put together my financial advising team. At that time I didn't understand many things about real economics that I have since learned. I honestly thought that the financial wizards from Wall Street and the investment bankers told the best story to explain the financial disasters that befell us. I believed that financing based on debt instruments, borrowing money, was the how things did, and should work. I believed that financial wealth represented real wealth. After all, if one just looks at the bankers' homes in the Hamptons, one assumes they were doing something right.

I now understand that the vast majority of the financial system in this country and around the world is essentially a gigantic Ponzi scheme. I now see that the only benefactors of the massive stimulus package called TARP has been the bankers and Wall Street traders we bailed out to keep that Ponzi scheme going. I now see that the auto makers are truly moribund and trying desperately to hang on to a vision of America and world that is now dead.

I must humbly ask your forgiveness for this egregious error in judgment. I am, tomorrow, beginning to take steps to rectify this error by imposing, by executive order, a huge tax on Wall Street profits and the incomes of the top earning ten percent of Wall Street employees in an attempt to truly recapture the wealth that they essentially stole from the American people. There will be other measures to follow and these will be enforced, if need be, by my command of the military and the Justice Department. Criminal investigations may be pursued where the evidence suggests wrong doing on the part of these people.

I now call on Congress to empower me to follow a course of action necessary to right this wrong. Much as you gave former president Bush the power to go to engage in preemptive war in Iraq, I'm asking you, this evening, to give me the economic adjustment equivalent of that power. I will bring a bill to the Hill tomorrow and expect very swift bipartisan action to get the bill passed within one week.

Going forward will be problematic even if we can recoup most of the wealth from the financial system. I now realize that we should have been investing our wealth in hard assets that the country can actually use to mitigate several truly desperate situations. Rather than talk about a jobs program, to create jobs that may just be busy work with no real purpose in the long run, I propose a national development and implementation program for a renewable energies infrastructure. I will propose to Congress that we nationalize our vital energy production and distribution systems to assure that we are doing just the right things to combat the coming energy shortages due to the fact that we will, out of necessity, diminish our uses of fossil fuels in the near future. I say out of necessity because, first, fossil fuel production, especially that of petroleum, is peaking. It has reached the point of maximum production and will soon start to decline. This is both a geophysical fact and an economic fact. It is simply becoming cost ineffective to continue extracting fossil fuels for our energy sources. Second, the burning of fossil fuels throughout the Industrial Revolution to the current day has produced so much carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, that it is now having an impact on our climate at an accelerating rate. We need to stop producing carbon-based energy in order to minimize, though we cannot now eliminate, the damage to our world resulting from global warming and ocean acidification.

But here is the really bad news. Our economy runs on high powered energy. We cannot escape this fact. Even alternative, renewable energy sources such as solar and wind cannot begin to replace the power we get from fossil fuels. If we started building renewable energy infrastructure tomorrow and maintained a growth rate of 10% per year, we would still not replicate the energy flows we receive right now from fossil fuels for another twenty years. The same is essentially true for nuclear energy. On top of the problem of building infrastructure to scale, we have to replace all of our standing transportation stock, the cars we drive, trucks, busses, trains, etc. with electrified versions. And all the while the energy from fossil fuels will be declining in a post-peak era.

In other words, citizens of the world and my fellow Americans, there is no physical way that we will not experience massive declines in economic activity over the next several decades. If we do set out to produce a minimal sustainable renewable energy infrastructure we will need to redirect some of our diminishing fossil fuel energy toward that effort. This amounts to something akin to the massive response that America made when first entering World War II. A complete and massive marshalling of our resources to fight an enemy that had knocked on our country's door. The only difference between that effort and the one we would have to mount today is that then there was adequate reserves of energy to do the work of converting work processes to meet the needs of war. Also, I should point out that the level of technology needed then was much simpler so the conversion could be done in a timely fashion. Compare a B-52 bomber with a modern B-2 stealth bomber. There were no computers on the B-52! The new technologies needed to manage, for example, the so-called Smart Grid will require myriad computers at all levels just to make things work.

I suspect, and my new science and technical advisors have informed me that this is the case, that the degree of difficulty with a modern WWII-style mobilization will be a logistical nightmare. It will take every ounce of our cleverness and every measure of our collective wisdom to make the right judgments and choices. And even then it is only conceivable in a world where our citizens are ready, willing, and able to make substantial sacrifices in their life styles in order to have the reserves we need to get the job done. It will involve sacrifices that will not benefit the current generation, probably not even the next generation. It will be accomplished for the benefit of generations many years from now, our descendants.

This is not easy to stand before you and say. Every past politician succeeded by telling people what they wanted to hear. And people do not want to hear bad news. They do not want to hear that they will have to sacrifice their way of life so that some unknown future generation can have a better existence. Let us be honest with ourselves. We have all become spoiled by the good life afforded by the free flow of oil and availability of cheap coal and natural gas. We have gotten used to economic growth as the model of normalcy. And why shouldn't we have enjoyed this material prosperity? Why shouldn't we expect people in what we have been calling the developing world would want the same things? They are fun and give us more pleasant lives in general. But unfortunately it was a flash in the pan. The non-renewable resources had to run out eventually. We just happen to live at the time when that is beginning to show itself.

Ironically, there have been seers through the ages who have warned us of this. From Malthus to the Meadows team — the Limits to Growth report to the Club of Rome — we have actually known that the party would come to an end, even if we didn't exactly know when or what limiting factor would finally be the constraining force. We foolishly ignored these warnings and kept growing and using resources as if there were no tomorrow, until the main resource, energy started to decline. And now I must stand here and tell you with all sorrow that there may not be a tomorrow. This may be true for your children and it may actually be true for you as well.

But as your president, having learned some terrible lessons about the limited views of a few greedy people, I now seek to correct the first missteps.

Along with the above mentioned legislation I will later this week approach the Congress with a bill to give the Executive branch the authority and power to mount a full out marshalling of our nation's resources to plan and begin building the necessary infrastructure, including the electric generation capabilities of renewable energy sources, electric distribution through a new grid capable of handling the unique qualities of intermittent sources. It will include the conversion of transportation options, such as trains and mass transit, to electrification. It will also include the more rational organization of living in our country. Our suburban lifestyle cannot be sustained as energy from oil and natural gas diminish. There is no viable efficiency standard that can be adopted for automobiles that would compensate for the coming cost of gasoline and diesel fuels. We will need to reorganize in smaller communities, primarily distributed in areas that can support more labor intensive agriculture. Indeed, the new jobs of the future are likely to be in the agriculture sector as we rely less and less on fuels to run our industrial farms and natural gas to produce our fertilizers.

Only a comprehensive package of carefully planned actions, a systems approach, will work given the need for timely action. This is not something that can be worked out in partisan politics, as I found out with the moribund health bill. I have to take charge of this process and see to it that it is done quickly but correctly. To that end I have appointed an advisory team of scientists and engineers who will be tasked with coordinating the work that is needed to make this happen. There will be no seats at that table for politicians and policy makers who do not have a substantial scientific education so that they can understand the problems and what will be needed for solutions. The time of policy-driven solutions is past. I found this out the hard way in being a lawyer with minimal understanding of physics and biology, thinking that the legal mind should be in the driver's seat. I have now realized that the limitations of my knowledge blinded me to reality. But that is the past. I have embarked on a crash course in the sciences needed for someone in my position to grasp these problems realistically. I am learning and I strongly advise all citizens of the world to do the same.

One final point. Should the Congress fail to understand the urgency of the situation and not get behind this bill soon, I will be forced to take more radical actions to see to it that the jobs gets done. We are in the equivalent of a war state, a war against our own prior stupidity and foolishness. When there is an eminent threat to the United States and our allies, the president can invoke war powers and declare a state of emergency and martial law. I promise you that I will not hesitate to do so if need be to preserve the best semblance of civilization that we can. We will not preserve our so-called 'way of life'. That is no longer even an option. But we can preserve our human dignity and work together to build a reasonable and wiser future. Thank you and may everyone in the world receive the blessings of knowledge and understanding.

Or, something like that!

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1/28/10

Post-mortem

Told you so!

Obama did not disappoint me. His rhetoric was pretty much what I would have expected. And he did not even attempt to address the deeper issues that are going to have such a major impact on all citizens of the world, as well as those of the US, in just a few years (or actually are already having a significant impact). That is the world of politics. It is the world of people who honestly, though mistakenly, believe that political process and policy decisions make reality.

In truth I could not listen after I heard him utter the phrase "clean coal". He is still so out of touch with simple physics that it is terribly sad. That his science adviser, John Holdren, a physicist, has not been able to make him understand that this is an oxymoron is sadder still (I'm assuming Holdren has tried). Same for Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy. Surely he is aware of the negative thermodynamics of sequestering carbon dioxide from coal burning, turning it into a compressed or liquefied gas and pumping it under extreme pressure into the ground! Or maybe their involvement in politics has made them forget their basic science. Who knows?

I did tune in for the post-speech commentary on NPR. Nothing really revealing there. The belief that something like a high speed rail in Florida is a good idea is also sad. Will it create a few jobs there? Probably. Will that be enough? Clearly not. Moreover, did anyone even think about the cost-benefit comparison between fixing the rail lines that we already have, beefing up rail transportation as it exists so that many more jobs would be created and it would benefit the whole country for ages to come vs. making it easier for business people to get between two cities that may actually be under water in a few decades? I seriously doubt it.

Here is the real problem. Our president doesn't really have a vision of the future. He has a vision of the past with a green sugar coating that makes it sound like a future. His problem is he really hasn't done the arithmetic to see if things add up. Otherwise he would know that the notion of restoring a growth-oriented economy is complete nonsense. And if he ever did, in fact realize this, he would then have to tell the truth to a lot of people who wouldn't want to hear it. And like Jimmy Carter, who did get it and did tell the truth, the American people would throw him out. In spite of Obama's statement that he would rather have one great term than two mediocre terms, he hasn't actually come to grips with what a great leader would need to do to have that kind of impact.

But look. We can't really blame him. He is in an impossible position. Even if he did get it and was willing to sacrifice his shot at a second term in office he would still face a completely dysfunctional government. He wouldn't be able to get anything done (unless he took my advice and declared Martial law!) The current state of political affairs in the US is just untenable. The Congress is full of fools and madmen. They really don't care about the future, except as far as the next election is concerned. They are pretty ignorant themselves with a few notable exceptions. And for those few I imagine it must be excruciatingly frustrating to try to get anywhere in that environment. And the Supreme Court? Just look at their latest ruling (admittedly a 5-4 decision) that gives corporations unlimited access to buy elections. At least that is the likely effect.

These are the people who run our government folks. We, collectively, had a lot to do with putting them there. Electing Bush as president allowed the Supreme Court to be taken over by demagogic ideologues. Of course it had many other devastating effects on the country and the world (Iraq and Afghanistan certainly). But some of those could have been corrected by Obama if he actually had followed through on his promises. His decision to escalate in Afghanistan will, I think, prove to be one of his biggest mistakes in foreign affairs. His biggest mistake domestically remains his appointments of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to their respective positions. Or perhaps more so his acceptance of their formulas for fixing the economy (bail out the banks).

So the upshot of the SOTU address is this: Things are going to get a lot worse, faster. Mark my words. If I'm wrong, you can come back in a few months or a few years and tell me I was full of s**t (I'm sure some of my students will be happy to see that). Somehow I don't think you will have the opportunity.

Comments

[Robin Datta]

the power to go to engage in preemptive war in Iraq, I'm asking you, this evening, to give me the economic adjustment equivalent of that power.

Echoes of Carter

[Robin Datta]

The B-52 did not fly until 1952 - well after the Serond World War:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-52_Bomber

Lanec versions carried quite sophisticated (for the time) electronics.

Even the "Enola Gay" (which dropped the "Little Bay" on Hiroshima) was a B-29 Superfortress - a prop job. its successor, the B-47 Stratojet served the United States Air Force from 1951 through 1969

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-47_Stratojet.

[Robin Datta]

The more one stirs a bucket of - shall we say - humanure, the more it stinks. Maybe in his wisdom the POTUS has decided to let it compost. Let's hope it does not hit the fan!

[rainman]

If Obama gave your speech, my guess is it would be his death warrant.

[George Mobus]

Hi rainman.

I suspect you are right. I am forever wishing we lived in a world where the public and the leaders were sapient individuals!

George

[George Mobus]

Robin,

Thanks for the correction. Whoops! I had taken a tour of a WWII bomber (used in the raids over Germany) in a flight museum south of Portland Or. It was really primitive and small. The tail gunner's seat was not the kind of thing an ordinary human being would want to take! Not being a plane aficionado I mixed up my designations. Figures.

RE: the wisdom of the POTUS; I really think a wise man would not have even sought the job in the first place.

George

[Joe McCarthy]

You may have already read (and even blogged about) this, but in reading your hypothetical state of the union speech, I was reminded of David Korten's idealized inaugural speech, "The Speech President Obama Should Deliver… But Won't":

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/path-to-a-new-economy/the-speech-president-obama-should-deliver...-but-wont

While energy is not his primary focus, he does include it among his agenda items, although he proposes a localization vs. nationalization policy:

"We will strive for energy independence by supporting local entrepreneurs who are creating local businesses to retrofit our buildings and develop and apply renewable-energy technologies."

Despite some differences in prescriptions, I think there are several intersections in your respective descriptions of the core challenges facing us today (and how and why they have arisen).

[George Mobus]

Joe,

I hadn't seen this piece but will take a look.

There are actually several other writers who have wanted to put words in the President's mouth and many have very similar desires.

I think the reason there is some overlap in many of our desires is that we are on the ground where ground truth can be seen up close and personal. The folks in Washington exist in their own abstract world. That is my take on it anyway!

George