Bumpy ride ahead.
If you pay attention to the stock market - I certainly do - then you're watching the financial sector digest the European debt crisis. This is reflected in the VIX, the "volatility index," which measures economic risk and reacts to it. The higher it gets, the more we expect to see whipsaws in the market, huge rises and plunges, often in the same day.
Even if you don't have skin in the game, you probably have a sense of unease, a disquieting feeling, when you read or hear about financial markets in turmoil. You wonder if the next Big One is going to hit.
The Long Recession was never fully branded a "Depression," because we respect the fact that as bad as this has been, you don't equate Columbine with Auschwitz. We haven't seen the worst that could be: Bread lines. People knocking at your door begging for food. Millions marching on Washington demanding relief.
But we know that this is possible.
Thanks to social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, people in poverty are organizing and waging so-called "flash mobs," mostly for sport. The authorities are noticing, and recognizing that these curiosities could be harbingers of larger things to come. An American Spring, if you will.
But let's get back to Europe, the place that catches a cold anytime we sneeze. A major reason they are in crisis is that our economy is weak. The French have a hard time selling fussy cheeses and truffle oils to India. We are their primary market and when we tighten our belts, they suffer.
Our national politics may be an amusing gameshow, a sport, played out like entertainment. But to the rest of the world, the outcome is critical.
We are destabilizing the world economy, ramping up the VIX, causing investors - large and small - to panic because we are, as a nation, behaving irrationally. Here's the situation:
So the plane is going down. And over the PA we hear:
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem in the cockpit. We have an engine out, we're losing altitude, and we've radioed for help. The captain is getting out of his seat, and getting ready to turn the controls over to Bozo the Clown.
That's pretty much what we're saying when we line up Bachmann and Perry to take over control. The failure of the republicans to forward an even marginally viable candidate means that the choice facing the world economy will be a 50/50 toss-up between our current leadership, or a clown with a rotting cabbage for a brain. And fully half our population is taking a serious look at the clown.
Y'know, I'm thinking maybe we oughta give Bozo here at shot at landing the plane.
It isn't a serious proposition. It's the stuff of comedy. Replace Obama with a person who not only has wrong ideas about science, but who believes that science itself is the work of the Devil. A secessionist, a person worried about the resurgence of the Soviet Union. This would be funny if it weren't serious.
When you are on the operating table, you don't want to hear your surgeon say, "OK, I'm outta here. Let Carrot Top finish this one up." But that's pretty much what we're telling the world: We are not serious.
The chief complaint expressed by vocal members of the left is that President Obama isn't progressive enough. Fair opinion. The Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex is alive and well. He didn't kill it, or couldn't, or is a mere creature of it. It still feels like "business as usual" in many ways.
Of course, he has picked good people for the Supreme Court, has given us some help in dealing with the health industry. He's accomplished some heavy lifts. The status quo would have been no help on any front, and accelerating damage. So I see him trying to correct the course of that plunging plane, while the copilot is fighting him at the controls.
He could be doing better, and I hope that he's re-elected and does fight harder for us. Less bi-partisanship and more combativeness. But the choice facing our nation - and the world - is having a qualified, intelligent, thoughtful American president, or Jerry Lewis high on nitrous oxide with his finger on the nuclear button.
As we prepare for the upcoming election, let's keep in mind that the stronger President Obama looks, the less likely it appears that a clown will get hold of the controls, the more the global economy will stabilize and strengthen. Our recovery, jobs, housing prices, the cost of fuel, all the things that are important, depend on the likelihood that we don't do something really stupid.
Fasten your seatbelt.