Zombies and Hippies: How Bad Brains Make for a Worse Housing Market

by Jim Washburn

A friend was in Japan during the earthquake/tsunami/meltdown trifecta, and he has gone back a few times since, helping family and friends. He just returned from three weeks there, and his description of the situation and mood is grim.

Just because our media has moved on to other shiny objects, that doesn’t mean the crisis is over in Japan, not by a long shot. If all goes right—and what ever does?—the Fukushima nuclear power plant’s three reactors won’t be brought under control until next January. In the meantime, they continue spewing radiation into the lifestream, and no one knows just how colicky their reactor fuel might become.

Tokyo, one of the most vibrant go-go-go cities on Earth, today makes my friend think of the Cold War era East Berlin. It’s dark and cheerless. The electricity’s off a lot, and people conserve it when it’s on. (Even pre-tsunami, modern, gadget-loving Japan managed to consume half the energy per capita of America, because individuals care about the whole society, and because that society recognizes human abetted climate change to be a huge problem in need of solutions.)

A lot of people are demoralized now, reeling from the deaths and their way of life being swept away; further demoralized by learning how lax regulation and corporate avarice worsened the crisis; neither is it encouraging to know that there’s radiation in the food, air and water.

It’s Japan’s worst time in over 65 years, and you know what? The Japanese yen is kicking ass on our dollar right now. At least part of the reason is that a handful of goobers in Congress think the world doesn’t have enough crises already, and concocted the so-called “debt ceiling crisis.”

 Along with helping our global neighbors with their troubles, as neighbors should, at home in the US we’re enduring a record heat wave, with record droughts in several states. We keep getting slammed by some of the worst hurricanes and floods in our history, following a brutal winter. We’re still trying to extricate ourselves from two very messy wars. We’re under constant threat of terrorist attack. We’re sopping up the oil from the worst ecological disaster in our history. We’re still reeling and just barely recovering from one of our worst economic crises. It would be nice to have a couple of days between crises to catch our collective breath.

Instead, Tea Party members of Congress decided to create a crisis, holding our immediate fiscal future hostage by tying a vote to raise our debt ceiling to a set of radical demands that’s diametrically opposed to what a majority of Americans expect from their government. .

As a New Yorker article by James Surowieki explains, Congress voting on the debt ceiling was not something the founding fathers ever envisaged. It dates from early in the last century, when Congress adopted it as a tool to rein in the power of the executive branch, since budget allocations at the time were largely determined by the White House. When Congress wrested that power away in 1974 the debt ceiling vote became a redundancy, since Congress had already determined how much debt we’d incur by the spending it had approved. As the article points out, should Congress fail to raise the debt ceiling, it would place President Obama in a unique legal bind: He’s legally bound to spend the money allocated by Congress, but would also be legally prevented from spending it by Congress.

They should just get rid of the thing, but instead it’s become a rubber-stamp formality: Congress approves a budget, then adjusts the debt ceiling to accommodate it, as it has done, largely without incident, 70 times in the past 50 years. On rare occasions it has been used as a political football; once during Ronald Reagan’s reign, when he most strongly advised that it was perilous to monkey with it.

To not vote to raise the debt ceiling would cause the United States to default on its obligations, risking the nation’s credit rating, and making it harder for everyone—government, business and individuals—to get a loan. Home loans and home construction would be expected to be hit especially hard.

Realtors are already reporting that the uncertainty in Washington is causing potential homebuyers to balk, worrying about mortgage rates and the economy in general.

Even if an 11th-hour bill is passed, the Tea Party’s recklessness may result in a downgrading of the United States’ credit rating, according to Standard & Poors. (Here’s a good Robert Sheer piece on the mess.)

It would seem like a no-brainer that even a hint of the US defaulting on its debts should be avoided at all costs. Regrettably, we have no shortage of congressmen with no brains.

Brains are delightful and practical things to have. They collect information. They process information. They arrive at logical conclusions. Brains helped us survive in the jungle. Brains helped the Scarecrow in Oz. Brains help us find solutions to new problems in our increasingly complex world.

But an increasing number of people in our society, and in our legislatures, have dispensed with brains, because reason is inconvenient to them. They don’t believe in man-made climate change, because they think it’s a matter of belief, despite the consensus in the scientific world about it, and the mounting evidence that the change is worse and happening faster than predicted.

Some of them don’t believe President Obama was born in the United States, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Despite overpopulation being at the root of many of our problems, they don’t believe in family planning, and have demonized Planned Parenthood, which could be a contributing factor in the Molotov cocktailing of a Planned Parenthood office in McKinney, Texas this last week.

They don’t believe in government regulation, despite the financial meltdown, recent mine disasters, the gulf oil spill and numerous other recent calamities being the result of deregulation or lax regulation.

They don’t believe in government programs, no matter how successful they are or how important they are to a vast majority of Americans. So they don’t much mind if they dash it all to pieces by their actions. .

According to ABC correspondent Jim Avila—talking on The View, of all places—Tea Partiers think it’s just fine if the system crashes, because things might reorganize more along the lines they seek, which as far as I can tell means moving back into caves and subsisting on squirrel meat.

And speaking of no brains: The irresponsible acts of these congressmen is causing our allies to regard the situation as akin to a zombie movie, where the US is their teammate who’s been bit by a zombie. As much as they may have affection for us, they’re watching us grow more irrational by the minute, and are waiting for the zombie infection to take over, which is when we start biting them.

That will pretty much be the case. If our financial system takes another hit, it will be felt in markets around the world. With our manufacturing base gone, maybe crazy is the only thing we have left to import. Consider Anders Behring Breivik, the suspect in those horrific killings in Norway, who was influenced by American hate websites.

I’m beginning to wonder if the Tea Party is today’s Weather Underground. Remember those wistful ’60s, when, for a couple of years, some earnest young Americans wanted to blow the whole place apart? I was 13 in 1968, young enough that the fuzzy notion of revolution seemed romantic to me. I didn’t want to see people hurt, but Yippie street theater and blowing up a few unoccupied draft board offices seem like a capital idea. The adult world and its values seemed like such tobacco-cured hogshit that some people thought, “Why not tear it all down, and build a righteous nation that doesn’t war, where America will be one big People’s Park with free Hendrix concerts; money will have no value, and the members of the Firesign Theatre can take turns being president?”

It wasn’t before I was too much older that I started wondering, as John Fogerty did, “Who’ll take the coal from the mine? Who’ll take the salt from the earth?” The more you live, and the more you care about the living, the more you temper your ideals with realities.

But the Tea Party and its unrealistic, absolutist stance reminds me of the morons who used to gather outside the Fillmore and demand of Bill Graham that all his shows had to be free. They couldn’t be bothered sweating details like rent, utilities or the fees their musical heroes demanded.

There are differences, of course. The hippie utopia was one where we’re all in this together. The Tea Party utopia, as far as I can tell, is one where you stay the hell off their property and everything else is owned and run by the Koch brothers.

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