Valleywag picked up a FriendFeed discussion between a few of us yesterday regarding the bailout bill within which Scoble blames “people like [me]” for the coming “breadlines”.  It rings a little hollow considering where I’ve been on all this and where he’s been (i.e. nowhere), but it brings a much more important issue to the fore.

To the thread in particular, I realize how acerbic my tone can be when discussing such things and try to be cognizant of that every time I write.  Sometimes my frustration – the result of a bit too much anguish about our national slumber – gets the best of me.  But Americans sat mostly silent as international and domestic crimes were perpetrated in their names and their economy was wrecked – choosing to glide along as if they had far more important things to think about.

Robert is right to describe the financial mess as the result of our collective idiocy.  The bill for one or two generations of stupidity has now come due and our remaining credit cards have been declined.  And for the moment, the social media characters participating in the specific tendril of web masturbation that is Robert’s “what to do” post have come up substantially empty.  So, I’ll see what I can come up with.

Louis Gray tells us the lesson from the long-foreseen economic crisis ought to be that there are no experts. I think that’s bullshit.  Perhaps in a stock-picking context it’s partly true, but the broad conclusion is flawed.  Historically in such things, there exists, in fact, those who were right and those who were wrong.  The arguments that were made on each side, and the subsequent decisions we made as a nation.   Yet, we are compulsively eager to skip over that kind of reflection and self-analysis, all too quick to “move on” and shelter ourselves from the requisite soul-searching that might illuminate us as to how, exactly, we arrived there in the first place.

And now – whether it was the War in Iraq, our brutalized Constitution, or the global credit fiasco now caving in on our heads – our tendency to continue listening with nary a critical whimper to the very voices who led us astray is criminally derelict.  We are heavy sleepers indeed.

It is now too late to escape serious economic pain; I won’t go into it all again here.  Rather, in the spirit of Robert’s sincere quest for solutions, I will suggest a serious way we can work together to fix the systemic ills that brought us to this place.

I’m not asking you to give up your gadgets nor to stop blogging about blogging.  Social media is unquestionably transforming our global culture and our politics.  But let’s devote less energy to the tools themselves and more to the fuller realization of their potential.  I suggest a little less time navel-gazing and a little more time using your voices, tools and networks to catalyze broad, deep, honest conversations about public policy.  And it will be contagious: in doing so, you will set an example for the millions who will see and hear you.

Scoble is also right that it is not without hope.  So, all of you: call your legions to arms.  Tell them a national emergency requires that they spend an hour a day seriously evaluating the American way of life, thinking critically about where we stand as a nation, how we got here, and how they might help in the rebuilding.  This is not politics; this is hardcore societal bodywork.  We face a national existential crisis — please consider that it’s at least possible this is not a bump in America’s road, but a big, dark, howling crevasse.  And as we speed toward it, contrary to popular mythology the people in charge aren’t in the White House or in the boardrooms of corporate America; they are buying shit on eBay and watching The Bachelor.

The Great American Experiment – for all its warts, the most successful social startup in history – is in serious peril, and only an awakened citizenry can restore it.

So, social media stars: ask your readers if all of this is what they had in mind for America and the world when they first formed their ideals about their country and their world.  Ask them if they want to talk about a society that is open, fair, honest, and free – or if they want to actually ensure it.  Give them homework; for a timely example, make them sit through Bill Moyers’ interview of Colonel Andrew Bacevich.  Command them to sit, open-minded, and listen to the whole freaking hour.

Ask each reader to take immediate steps to get vigorously involved in a political campaign, public policy issue, or a nonprofit they care passionately about.  It doesn’t matter what or who the cause is, so long as it stirs them to their core.  Tell them to call, write, show up for shit, volunteer, even give a few bucks if they can.  Ask them to do the things that make their hair stand up.  Whatever it may be, press them to take concrete steps toward nourishing something bigger than themselves – and demand that they to it today.

Tell them to “tithe” their time; for every hour they spend aTwitter or aBlogging, ask for 10 minutes toward something for their country, their planet, or their fellow human being.  Press them each to seriously commit a certain percentage of their time to something that, in their eyes, is likely to improve the human condition.  Not to spend this time – but to invest it in the collective good; to view it as a massive global-citizenship 401(k) in which we are all shareholders and beneficiaries.

And regularly inquire of your leagues as to how they are endeavoring, every single day, to evolve the nation and world they live in.

That’s what to do.

• We were told that calamity was imminent, and a failure to act and do exactly what Bush asked of us would result in a disaster;
• Congress was strongarmed into doing something big and something fast, without time for proper analysis;
• We were conned into spending hundreds of billions of our hard-earned dollars (much for the benefit of corporate malfeasants) – only to take a giant step backward;
• We handed legal immunity and absolute control to the very authorities who demanded the actions;
• We were lied to every step of the way.

And eventually the majority came around to see it as a colossal blunder.  So, I think Congress would serve itself and the People well if it took a much more measured approach to this, or even refused the bailout.  I know, I’m asking for cajones of steel here, but I can dream.

If this goes through, it will be the swindle of the century.

I’ll close with a few words from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That is fascism; ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

How did we get here?  Is it too late to stop it?

Bacevich’s 2007 op ed in the Washington Post provides some sad but interesting background.  His new book is here.

Now that McClellan’s book is being released, there’s some hype emerging. So far everything I’ve seen is stuff  [most of us] have known for ages; but this is admittedly the first solid inside verification of these crimes and cover-ups. Politico has a good exclusive on it. Some excerpts:

“[President Bush] and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

Regarding his public denial that Libby or Rove had leaked classified information:

“I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood… it would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the president effectively. I didn’t learn that what I’d said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later.”

Read: I am not a felon, because although I passed along a lie, I did not know it was a lie when I did so.

“Neither, I believe, did President Bush. He, too, had been deceived and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

This is where I do not share McClellan’s optimism about the President. Especially when you consider what McLellan later says about the President’s case for war:

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise.”

And to what would later turn out to be optimistic forecasts about the financial impact of Iraq:

“Bush was ‘clearly irritated, … steamed,’ when McClellan informed him that chief economic adviser Larry Lindsey had told The Wall Street Journal that a possible war in Iraq could cost from $100 billion to $200 billion: “‘It’s unacceptable,’ Bush continued, his voice rising. ‘He shouldn’t be talking about that.’”

So: lie about a war that costs thousands of lives and trillions of dollars; lie about outing a covert CIA operative; order violations of the fourth amendment and lie about that – as a nation, we can live with all of this.

But lie about a blow job and get impeached. Welcome, folks, to the government we deserve.

Today, the press is all over the CBS/NYT poll that shows 81% of Americans feel the nation is “on the wrong track.” I agree with those Americans, but probably wouldn’t share their reasoning. What didn’t get as much attention was the recent “News IQ” poll by Pew Internet Life that drilled down a bit to explore what we know about things like our society, our government, and the war being fought with our dollars and our permission. I was pleasantly surprised at how relatively well people did.

Some highlights:

• Only 28% of respondents know approximately how many Americans have died in Iraq (and Pew notes that this is an all-time low and “awareness is dropping”).
• 70% knew Condi Rice is Secretary of State
• 62% could identify “Sunni” as the branch of Islam fighting the Shia in Iraq
• 56% knew McCain was from Arizona
• 40% knew Howard Dean chairs the DNC
• 35% knew Ben Bernanke chairs the Federal Reserve

Of course, these were phone interviews of 1000 people who were willing to sit through a phone trivia test, and who were given four multiple choice answers from which to choose. I frankly find the results impressive, but I’ll bet if they had conducted the same survey outside a Wal-Mart in middle America without the benefit of “multiple choice”, the numbers would have been much, much worse.