Dear readers.

I spent this morning with Jeff, discussing his teaching job, education in America, government corruption, and our sons. Jeff is a high school math teacher who has to manage a classroom with techniques that are both defensive and creative. The national dropout rate is 30%. How can any civilization expect to last when 3 out of 10 high school students wind up on the street? What will they do with their free time? Work at McDonald’s? Run dope?

This morning, after seven and a half years of the Bush League in power, the seeming deconstruction of American society is nearly complete, the convergence of economic collapse, foreign policy debacle, environmental treachery and neglect, faith based decision making without reason, Supreme Court fascists, and political injustice in the Justice Department. Since February of 2001 I have been saying.” How much worse can it get?” …and it keeps getting worse.

Now in the waning days of President Bush, violence is picking up in Iraq, Afghanistan worsens, war is threatened in Iran, Mugabe steals the election in Zimbabwe, the killing goes on in Dar-fur, Myanmar recovers from drowning, China recovers from the quake, the Midwest recovers from the flood, fires burn in Northern California, and this summer there may be an open Arctic Ocean. Don’t you wish there was competence in charge at the top?! Now we descend into electoral hell with Obama and McCain.

McCain pleases no one in the Republican Party because he is simultaneously trying to please both sides of an irreconcilable split. He changed his positions on conservative soclal issues, but the Christians don’t trust him, nor should they. He is not a real “born again” like George.

Obama and McCain are both flukes as candidates in a way. By all rights and means Hilary should have won. She had the support of the joint chiefs, her husband, eight years in the White House, the Senator from New York, the feminist wave, the party machine, favors to call on. She could depend on racism as her friend.

But Obama surprised a lot of people, because he represents not just change, but a deeper philosophical and generational change that is hoped for. He was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. He handles questions with a smoothness and competence that the cynical media will describe as charisma, but is really depth of character. He is the best candidate the democrats have put up since Bobby Kennedy.

In 1968, Bobby Kennedy had just won the California primary when he was assassinated. The significance was that the victory assured him the nomination, confounding Richard Nixon who had no desire to lose to another Kennedy. Instead, with Bobby deceased, the Democratic Party split between Gene McCarthy, the anti-war candidate, and Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s VP.

The sad result was the Chicago convention/riots. The disaster in Chicago resulted in the Nixon victory, and the rest, as they say, is history. Nixon gave us Watergate. Watergate gave us President Ford, the first American president not to be elected to be either president or vice president. Ford gave us Carter, the first president from the South since the Civil war. Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis gave us Reagan who surfed on the wave of prop 13 and anti government sentiment, Reagan the consummate image creation, the former salesman for Rockwell who rose on the rhetoric of cheap government. A simple look at Reagan’s lack of energy policy during the 80s shows how we got to where we are today.

Carter put solar panels on the White House. Reagan removed them. Not only was there no energy conservation program during the 80s, but SUVs were defined as light trucks and exempted from federal fuel economy laws, giving rise to the current crisis in not only the energy field, but in the collapse of the US auto industry as well.

So where was the Clinton administration? After the debacle of the health care fix under the leadership of Hilary Clinton, the Democrats lost the Congress in 1994. This led to the rise of Newt Gingrich and ultimately the impeachment of a President who couldn’t say no to a hiked up skirt and a willing sex partner. The president became preoccupied with an impeachment for lying about sex, at the same time convincing the entire country that every thing they ever thought about lawyers splitting semantic hairs was true. Meanwhile the security situation in the Middle East began to disintegrate.

Enter Bush and Cheney, the petrocracy come to power. Big surprise that we go to war over oil! The only thing that was new was Bin Laden. And it turns out that that wasn’t new either. In Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11, we learned that the Bin Laden family was immediately flown out of the country after the World Trade Center collapse. Next we see the president holding hands with the Saudi King Abdullah. Enough, enough, you say, but wait, there’s more!

As the Bush administration came in, the dot com bust was starting. Bush didn’t take any strong steps to bolster the economy, and then with 9-11, the economy went into a tailspin as airlines, already in trouble, began to go bankrupt. The Fed stepped in to save the economy. The Fed’s tools are fairly meager. They lowered the prime all the way to 1%. This stimulated that portion of the economy that likes low interest rates – housing and cars.

The auto makers were doing 0% financing, effectively paying us to buy cars. It worked, for the housing and auto sectors. But Industrial growth was at a standstill. NAFTA and WTO added to competition that American manufacturing couldn’t deal with, under-priced by cheap labor in Asia as they were. It took years for a recovery in new manufacturing. In the meantime housing was taking off like a rocket. Banks and loan brokers were bundling loan products and wholesaling them out, making huge profits in the process. The dispossessed saw home prices spiraling up and out of reach. The only way to get into home ownership was to buy houses out on the urban fringes, in loan packages that were interest-only in most cases by 2006.

These adjustable rate loans with balloon payments were high risk, but everyone was happy as long as prices continued to rise, and equity build up happened through the price increase. But sooner or later, the low prime party had to stop. The fed started raising the rates, all the way up to 5.25%. This triggered higher loan payments on the adjustable rate home loans, and down came the house of cards.

This scenario resembles the origins of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Speculators made huge paper profits, and saw them disappear overnight. Homeowners were suddenly in debt beyond their means and driven to bankruptcy. What to do?

Obama and McCain. John McCain will be 72 in his first year in office if he wins. Here is a Viet Nam War vet, a war that ended over three decades ago. McCain is the poster boy of the past, and no matter what sort of decent guy he may be, he has pledged to be in Iraq for 100 years if that’s what it takes, a war that is by any reckoning a mistake and a disaster.

Obama is the uniter, the one who can bring the country back together, inspiring urban rejuvenation, bringing competence to managing foreign affairs, with a sincere desire to help the world as a whole, not just conservative Christians. Obama is about the future and future generations. He is young where McCain is old. He is independent where McCain is tied to the Republican constituencies. His election will be historic, where McCain’s would be blase.

It is hard to say how the crises of the moment, energy, economy, and environment will turn out over the next four years. But if we as a people are to overcome these obstacles, it is going to take strong leadership and inspiration. It will take behavioral changes on the part of the public.

It will take the will to live. I would much rather have a vibrant, inspiring, intelligent and free thinker, than a man who changes positions to suit the religiousfundamentalists. Let’s get Obama elected.