December 31, 2009 05:46 PM UTC

Blue Moon

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• by: JO

How often do we get a blue moon’s ghostly light bridging two decades? Does it foretell lighter days and shorter nights to come, or is it merely an illusion that flipping a calendar portends a change? Like Janus, I see a bit of both:

–By March, “health care reform” will be a dim memory. No one will really understand what was done and what wasn’t, but since none of the key features of the legislation that did pass and was signed will take effect for some time, our attention will have passed to something else. Republicans may imagine they can rail against Socialized medicine; no one else will particularly care, at least not in 2010.

— The Little Recovery That Couldn’t. Headlines from 2009 claiming the foresee the beginning of the end of the Great Recession will be used to wrap dead fish. The official Unemployment rate will remain stubbornly high, but may fall below 10%, which will be shouted from the rooftops as the Start of Something Big. The unofficial unemployment rate, counting those who have given up looking or can only find part-time work, will remain above 15%, maybe higher. But since we won’t see breadlines, a la the ’30s, the misery index will remain hidden behind curtains drawn in daytime to disguise the fact that the breadwinner is still churning out letters and resumes–to keep the unemployment benefits coming as much as in expectation of a positive response. But neither Democrats–who will ignore the ongoing Great Slump since it won’t help their election chances, nor the Republicans, who will continue to resist meaningful measures to stimulate employment–will talk much about this issue since it serves neither of their purposes.

— Bankers: Trust ‘Em. Ah, derivatives. We still don’t understand ’em, ’cause we can’t cook ’em for a barbecue here in the Alpine Forest, and bein’ ol’ farm gals, even if we could understand ’em, we don’t want to seem too brainy to our neighbor still looking for a job. What health care was to ’09, financial reform will be to ’10. “Regulating the market” will replace “public option” as the latest iteration of the Threat of Socialism, and we will see certain politicians’ True Colors flyin’ from their flagpoles. This may seem new, but it’s really quite old, at least as old as the Bush 2 era, when the major players opposed regulating derivatives. Turns out that some of those players–Summers and Geitner in office, Rubin reclocated to NYC–are still very much on the field. Only Greenspan has gone out to pasture, having admitted that Ayn Rand knew no more about economic policy than she did about the impact of imbibing too much Miracle Market Hokum. At least those of us in the Wild West can feel some involvement in this debate, since one of our envoys is a well-known devotee of avoiding “unintended consequences” of market regulation.

— The Year of MAY. No, not the 5th month. I refer to Middle Aged Yoga, in which practitioners assume contorted positions usually associated with real circus clowns in their continuing efforts to pretend that Never Smiling is the same thing as being dedicated to the commonweal as opposed to the eliteweal. Indeed, we’ve already seen some of the warm-up exercises: good to have someone who can talk the talk and walk the walk of Wall Street so that … so that what? He knows how to vote in order to keep the PAC Bucks flowing? At the risk of falling into the trap of predicting the future on this last day of the Past, I’ll suggest that justifying the Appointed One’s gyrations to justify Doing Nothing to Upset the Street will require assuming positions that lead to a run on ibuprofen at the very least.

— Splutter Cont’d. Talk hereabouts regarding a certain tone taken by some posters will die off, but the tone won’t improve. There are several reasons for this. One is that some people can’t really “think” without uttering the words “shit” and “fuck.” Can’t entirely blame ’em; it’s all in their jeans, or genes, or both. Plus, gotta recognize that it’s mighty frustrating not to be able to mount a credible counter-argument based on facts, which leaves only attacks on the person making the opposite argument, rather than on his or her position. Evidence is plentiful on this site as recently as the next-to-last day of the year. Expect to see more when the Practionerette in Chief is given magical powers; whether we’ll break 2009’s record of one post every other month, on average, is to be seen, but won’t matter except to those mostly interested in pop music. Meantime, intelligent, informed dialogue may seek an alternative venue. TBD.

Meantime, Happy New Year. There won’t be another one like it–one with a blue moon, I mean–until 2028.