Peter Singer

…for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.

–John Keats

In the New York Times, Princeton’s professional ethicist supreme Peter Singer admires the work of antinatalist South African philosopher David Benatar:

Schopenhauer’s pessimism has had few defenders over the past two centuries, but one has recently emerged, in the South African philosopher David Benatar, author of a fine book with an arresting title: “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.” One of Benatar’s arguments trades on something like the asymmetry noted earlier. To bring into existence someone who will suffer is, Benatar argues, to harm that person, but to bring into existence someone who will have a good life is not to benefit him or her. Few of us would think it right to inflict severe suffering on an innocent child, even if that were the only way in which we could bring many other children into the world. Yet everyone will suffer to some extent, and if our species continues to reproduce, we can be sure that some future children will suffer severely. Hence continued reproduction will harm some children severely, and benefit none.

Benatar also argues that human lives are, in general, much less good than we think they are. We spend most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that are all most of us can achieve are insufficient to outweigh these prolonged negative states. If we think that this is a tolerable state of affairs it is because we are, in Benatar’s view, victims of the illusion of pollyannaism. This illusion may have evolved because it helped our ancestors survive, but it is an illusion nonetheless. If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.

Here is a thought experiment to test our attitudes to this view. Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. Some stop eating meat, or flying abroad on vacation, in order to reduce their carbon footprint. But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about.

So why don’t we make ourselves the Last Generation on Earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction! …

Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too — here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do — that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?

I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now. But justifying that choice forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?

Friedrich Nietszche (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883-1885, prologue, §5) predicted with complete accuracy that the result of nihilism would be Benatars and Singers.

Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN.

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”–so asketh the last man and blinketh.

The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.

“We have discovered happiness”–say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one’s neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!

A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.

One still worketh, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becometh poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wanteth to rule? Who still wanteth to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.

“Formerly all the world was insane,”–say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.

They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon
reconciled–otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

“We have discovered happiness,”–say the last men, and blink thereby.

Cute blonde does a musical performance using only bubble wrap.

1:38 video

Hat tip to Doug Mataconis.

Ixtoc Fire and Oil Spill

The BP Oil Spill is a lot like the Ixtoc I Oil Spill of 1979.

It took ten months to stop the oil flowing after a gas explosion. They stopped it by drilling three relief wells. It spilled 140 million gallons and coated 170 miles (275 kilometers) of U.S. beaches, in some cases a foot deep in oil.

Recovery was nonetheless rapid, and wildlife populations were back to normal in a couple of years.

Some News Agency quotes a marine biologist who provides reasons for optimism.

The good news is the Ixtoc experience suggests the Gulf of Mexico has natural properties that help it cope with massive oil spills, scientists say. Warm waters and sunlight helped break down the oil faster than many expected. Weathering reduced much of the oil into tar balls by the time it reached Texas.

Two decades after the Ixtoc disaster, marine biologist Wes Tunnell sank his diving knife into an area where he had spotted a tar patch just after the spill. The blade came out black and tarry but the hardened surface of the patch was under sand, shells and algae that had completely covered it.

“No one else would know that it was anything other than a rock ledge,” said Tunnell of the Harte institute. “I think that the Gulf of Mexico is hugely resilient, or at least it was 30 years ago. We’ve insulted it a lot since then in various ways.”

The Gulf has also long dealt with oil that naturally seeps from the seafloor. Some experts estimate that tens of millions of gallons seep into the Gulf from natural up-wellings each year, fostering large populations of oil-eating bacteria and microorganisms.

The Revolution has not been effectuated and the left is turning on him. Former Beatle Paul McCarthy gushing over Obama is so two years ago, writes Toby Harnden in the Telegraph.

[I]t was not just McCartney’s dyed hair and 1960s songs that seemed so retro. His adulation of Obama struck the wrong chord because few outside the White House bubble are in that place any more. It is now permissible – even fashionable – to have a go at the man once hailed as the Messiah.

Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, Jr. (ret.)

I’m inclined to think the Directorate of National Intelligence is a supernumerary and redundant level of authority, destined to divert massive amounts of energy to turf battles and struggles over authority. I think that, instead of adding another supervisory layer, we should have revolutionarily changed the CIA from an intensely Congressionally-regulated, rear-end-protecting bureaucracy with its own agenda into something a lot more like the original O.S.S.

If Barack Obama was going to appoint anyone to this dubious position, this time he seems to have made a well-qualified, professional choice. George Smiley is well up on General Clapper’s career and has positive things to say.

While Clapper is largely unknown to most Americans, he has served in the intelligence community for most of his adult life. As a young signals intelligence officer, Clapper flew collection missions over Southeast Asia on a modified EC-47 aircraft. He advanced steadily over the decades that followed, serving as a senior intelligence officer in Korea during the mid-80s, and as the Air Force’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence during the first Gulf War. At the time of his retirement from active duty in 1995, Clapper was Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

As a civilian, Clapper spent time at two defense contractors before returning to government service in 2001 as the first civilian director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), which processes and analyzes much of the data collected from spy satellites and other sensors. He spent five years at the agency before resigning in 2006, reportedly because of conflicts with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Clapper testified before Congress that DoD’s four major intelligence agencies should report to the DNI, a position that angered his boss.

After Rumsfeld left the Pentagon, Clapper was nominated to rejoin the Bush Administration, this time as Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. In that post, he served as chief advisor on intel matters to the new SecDef, Robert Gates, and his deputy, William Lynn. Clappper also functioned as DoD’s primary liason to the DNI, led by retired Navy Admiral Mike McConnell (under President Bush), and more recently, under another former Navy flag officer, Dennis Blair. …

In terms of background and experience, Jim Clapper is (arguably) the most-qualified man for the job. He’s one of the few spooks who has run two major intelligence agencies, and (more importantly), General Clapper knows the nuts-and-bolts of the business. He knows the star performers (and the weak sisters) in the intelligence community, and has definite ideas about making the DNI construct more efficient and effective. …

Managing an intelligence apparatus that consists of 16 different agencies (and thousands of employees) is a daunting (some would say impossible) task. General Clapper certainly understands the terrain–and he knows the key players–but there’s no guarantee he can meld them into a more effective team.

Indeed, Clapper will face many of the same challenges that bedeviled his predecessors. The DNI has limited budget authority, curtailing his ability to control agencies and their operations. Intel organizations have, in the past, found it convenient to slow-roll (or even ignore) DNI directives that aren’t to their liking.

Clapper may also have problems with his boss in the White House. During the Bush Administration, General Clapper was a strong supporter of enhanced interrogation techniques, though he also fought for more transparency and accountability in intelligence matters. Clapper may well find himself in a major battle the next time a terror suspect is detained at an airport (or in a foreign land) and other administration officials push to treat the individual as a criminal defendant, and not a hostile combatant.

General Clapper also faces opposition in Congress. Both the Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (California’s Diane Feinstein) and the ranking Republican (Kit Bond of Missouri) have expressed reservations, noting that Clapper was often reluctant to brief Congress on the Pentagon’s intelligence activities. After 45 years in the intel business, Clapper knows that Congress leaks like a seive, but stonewalling the SSCI doesn’t win you any favors from people that control your budget.

Atlas sostiene la volta celeste, 2nd Century A.D., Collezione Farnese, National Archaeological Museum, Naples.

Claude Sandroff reacts with wholesome indignation to the ritual immolation of the corporate scapegoat by the High Priest of the Cult of the State and his media acolytes.

Obama and his team of thugs are dressed out in heavy boots aimed at BP’s neck. Apparently, oil booms and actionable emergency plans are in short supply in the government, but the Obama administration is buried under a glut of hard heels in a variety of men’s and women’s sizes. And they’re all ready to stomp on BP’s jugular.

Adding to BP’s public relations woes are some of Hollywood’s film geniuses, probably armed with decades of deep-water drilling experience, only too happy to dismiss the exhausted and skilled BP repair staff as a bunch of morons. My advice to the BP board of directors is that they simply accept the third-party assessments of their qualifications and tell Obama, his government, and his media acolytes that the time has come for them to take charge of capping the Deepwater Horizon riser. …

In the midst of this major ecological calamity, when BP can least cope with major distractions and vile recriminations, Obama’s clueless legal team has decided to threaten the company with a criminal probe. Tone-deaf Eric Holder is unable to pronounce the words “Islamic terrorist,” but he has already unleashed his justice department to cripple BP, essentially labeling it a criminal enterprise. Perhaps Obama and his band of goons need to hear from BP that they are stopping all capping efforts to concentrate on their legal defense.

As a BP shareholder, I wouldn’t be upset. Rather, I’d applaud BP’s actions and even buy more stock with full knowledge that its declaration of bankruptcy is all but guaranteed. It’s already rumored that some of BP’s valuable drilling assets in Alaska might have to be sold off to pay for the Gulf cleanup.

It’s a brilliant idea to sell those assets as quickly as possible. The environmental hit teams have no intention of letting anyone, anywhere, drill in the U.S. ever again. Not in Alaska, not in the Rockies, not in shallow water, and certainly not in deep water. Only the Brazilians and the Norwegians and the Mexicans, and the Chinese and the Indians and the British and the Angolans — only everyone else will be allowed to do that. …

BP must accept the reality that it is not GM. BO has no vast democrat union base of employees that must be protected at all costs and no mass vote-generating machine to deliver for Obama. They are expendable. They are not even GE, in complete control of a sycophantic media outlet always ready to sing the praises of Obama on broadcast and cable outlets, all day and all night.

BP might become Government Petroleum soon enough if they don’t act quickly. They should offer to sell off their expertise and assets to the Chinese, who at least will appreciate them and use them aggressively. While China’s state-owned oil exploration company, CNOOC, was denied the prize of Unocal in 2005, the United States is in a much weaker economic, military, and political position today with respect to China. Surely a BP sale would breeze through a regulatory review in today’s climate.

Assured access to a plentiful, long-term oil supply is the chief foreign policy concern of China. And BP could revel soon in the irony of drilling again in deep Gulf waters — only this time for the Chinese off the coast of Cuba.

John Heilemann is a progressive, and thus believes that Wall Street greed and deregulation, not government mortgage policies, caused the financial crisis, Obama saved capitalism when he should perhaps have simply nationalized the entire financial industry, and those deluded bankers don’t understand the righteous anger of the workers and the peasants. It is the moderate Obama, you see, that has been standing between them and the pitchfork-waving mob.

Personally, I think all that is a crock, but Heilemann’s gossipy account of the politics of Wall Street “reform” is amusing, and I do believe that he is accurately reporting the Street’s disenchantment with the Chosen One. I’d say where those bankers were clueless was back in 2008 when they allowed image, demeanor, and style to persuade them to believe that ideas and political polarities don’t really matter.

The speed and severity of the swing from enchantment to enmity would be difficult to overstate. When Obama was sworn into office, Democrats on Wall Street rejoiced at the ascension of a president in whom they saw many qualities to admire: brains, composure, bi-partisan instincts, an aversion to class-based combat. And many Wall Street Republicans—after witnessing the horror show that constituted John McCain’s response to the financial crisis—quietly admitted relief that the other guy had prevailed.

Today, it’s hard to find anyone on Wall Street who doesn’t speak of Obama as if he were an unholy hybrid of Bernie Sanders and Eldridge Cleaver. One night not long ago, over dinner with ten executives in the finance industry, I heard the president described as “hostile to business,” “anti-wealth,” and “anti-capitalism”; as a “redistributionist,” a “vilifier,” and a “thug.” A few days later, I recounted this experience to the same Wall Street CEO who’d called the Volcker Rule a testicular blow, and mentioned I’d been told that one of the most prominent megabank chiefs, who once boasted to friends of voting for Obama, now refers to him privately as a “Chicago mob guy.” Do all your brethren feel this way? I asked. “Oh, not everybody—just most of them,” he replied. “Jamie [Dimon]? Lloyd [Blankfein]? They might not say Obama’s a socialist, but they come pretty close.” …

At Goldman and elsewhere, the belief is strong that the case against Wall Street’s most storied firm was politically motivated; lately, Blankfein has taken to trashing Obama to his friends in unusually brutal personal terms. Dimon—who is fond of declaring, “I’m a patriot!” in meetings with White House officials—recently described himself publicly as “a wavering Democrat.”

And even those less bruised than them have found the experience traumatizing. “They’re not accustomed to being engaged in politics this way,” says a private-equity investor. “Their skin isn’t toughened. They actually take [the attacks by Obama] personally. This is a profession with a lot of smart people, but who aren’t necessarily terribly introspective. They think they actually deserve to make all this money. So any attack on their livelihood is, ahem, unpleasant.”

Maybe it was inevitable that the dewy-eyed affair between Wall Street and the White House would so quickly and nastily come a cropper. For more than 30 years, the approach of every administration to the financial industry has been either laissez-faire or actively deregulatory. On the left, much blame is placed at the feet of Clinton, Rubin and his then-deputy, Summers, but in truth they were merely part of a continuum that stretched back to Jimmy Carter. Considering how close the financial system came in 2008 to Armageddon, the consensus for imposing new rules and greater order was nearly universal (among the sane, at least). Yet that does little to lessen the sense of shock—of violation, really—that Wall Street feels. …

There are those who reckon that, what with the wailing and gnashing among both the plutocrats and the populists, Obama has actually found the political sweet spot. “Main Street is mad at the president because he’s too close to Wall Street, and Wall Street is mad at him because he’s too populist,” Altman says. “Therefore, almost by definition, he’s in the right place.”

Yet the political and financial implications of the rift between Obama and Wall Street may be significant. Already, Goldman, JPMorgan, UBS, and many other financial-services firms are shifting their contributions toward the GOP. Not long ago, a big-time Obama Wall Street fund-raiser asked his go-to guy at one of the megabanks that had lavishly supported the candidate in 2008 what level of donations the president might expect from the firm’s people in 2012. The answer was less than a tenth of the previous total.

Tuvalu

Andrew Bolt, at the Herald Sun (Australia), has a great deal of fun reporting on an item recently issue published in New Scientist exploding one of the best known Warmist disaster memes.

How embarrassing. Global warming worriers have gone from warning Tuvalu will drown to wishing it damn well had.

But look at it now. Not drowning, but waving. And, er … growing too?

You remember Tuvalu, of course, even if you’ve never figured quite where it was.

For years this glittering string of atolls has been shoved in your face as the poster islands of the global warming faith – this Eden we were killing with our Western sin.

How often we were told it could be the first Pacific nation to be swallowed by the rising seas caused by our evil gases.

In fact, warned Al Gore in his An Inconvenient Truth, so dire was this danger that “the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand” …

As a British judge later ruled, there was no evidence of climate refugees from the Pacific having to be evacuated to New Zealand or anywhere else to escape rising seas.

But truth has counted for dangerously little in this debate, and warmists told one Tuvaluan tale after another of an endangered Polynesian paradise that grew steadily more mythical.

I don’t just mean that the scare was exploded to preposterous proportions, as in this newspaper report just last year: “More than 75 million people living on Pacific islands will have to relocate by 2050 because of the effects of climate change, Oxfam has warned.”

I mean also that warmists felt entitled to invent complete fantasies for the cause. Take Prof Mohammed Dore, an environmental economist from Canada’s Dore University, who three years ago declared Tuvalu uninhabited already.

“In fact, there is an island called Tuvalu which was completely evacuated and New Zealand accepted all the residents because of sea level rising,” he wrote, much to the surprise of the island’s 12,000 residents, who have actually doubled their number in the past three decades, there being little else to do in the middle of the ocean.

And that’s their real problem. Surrounded by nothing but coconuts and fish, and with no employer other than the Government since the Nauruan phosphate industry died, how were they to get on in this great world?

What luck! Along came the global warming faith, and Tuvaluans must have seen in this greatest cargo cult of all a chance at last to earn a dollar – and maybe even get a visa to a new home in a richer land.

So I wasn’t surprised that Tuvalu’s prime minister in 2003 went to the United Nations to present a bill to the guilty Westerners he insisted were causing the seas to drown his home.

He really laid it on thick: “The threat is real and serious, and is of no difference to a slow and insidious form of terrorism against us.”

And the thick really laid it on here. Whole institutions were devoted to preaching – especially to children – that wicked Westerners were drowning the homes of innocent islanders.

Take professional warming alarmist Rob Gell, the TV weatherman, who in 2008 launched an exhibition at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum dedicated to convincing the gullible that we should take in all these soggy Tuvaluans before the waves lapped over their heads.

It was virtually a “foregone conclusion” that Tuvalu would be uninhabitable “within the next 50 years”, he claimed.

Naturally, Labor signed up to the scare, this being when it still believed man-made warming was “the great moral and economic challenge of our time” – a challenge so moral that any lie could be excused.

It even produced a “Pacific climate change plan” which promised help to global warming “refugees” as they fled low-lying island states such as Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu.

Said Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese: “The alternative to that is to say, and I don’t think any Australian would accept this, that were going to sit by while people literally drown.”

All of which culminated in the tearful plea from Tuvalu’s delegate, Ian Fry, at the UN’s great warmist gathering at Copenhagen last year – a performance that in every comic respect showed the sham behind the warming scare.

Cut your gases, or we die, he sobbed.

(Ian Fry begins choking up at 3:12 in this 3:38 video)

“I woke up this morning crying, and that’s not easy for a grown man to admit … The fate of my country rests in your hands.”

Wonderful stuff! The crowd went mad with applause.

Yet all this, too, was as fake as Al Gore. Fry is not from Tuvalu, has never lived there, and is not threatened by any rising seas, since the Queanbeyan home of this part-time Australian National University student is 144km from the nearest beach.

And now we know that Tuvalu, far from drowning, is rising from the seas.

It was already clear from the Australian-funded South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project that sea levels in the region were rising only microscopically, much as they’d done for centuries before the invention of the motor car or the light bulb.

BUT now New Scientist reports that however fast the seas are rising, Tuvalu and many other low-lying Pacific islands are so far rising even faster, thanks to coral debris, coral growth, land reclamation and deposits of sediment. Some have grown by as much as a third.

Auckland University’s Associate Prof Paul Kench, one of the two authors of the study, said he compared historical pictures from the past 60 years to satellite images of 27 Pacific islands.

“Eighty per cent of the islands we’ve looked at have either remained about the same or, in fact, (grown) larger,” he said.

(In fact, the real figure is an even more comforting 86 per cent.)

Jonah Goldberg argues that the hedonic consumerism nightmare of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) has proven more accurately prophetic of the dystopian direction of Modernity than the brutal collectivism of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949).

[P]olitics is increasingly a vehicle for delivering prepackaged joy. America’s political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now more and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered. And though it has been the subject of high school English essay questions for generations, we have not gotten much closer to answering the question, what exactly was so bad about the Brave New World?

Simply this: it is fool’s gold. The idea that we can create a heaven on earth through pharmacology and neuroscience is as utopian as the Marxist hope that we could create a perfect world by rearranging the means of production. The history of totalitarianism is the history of the quest to transcend the human condition and create a society where our deepest meaning and destiny are realized simply by virtue of the fact that we live in it. It cannot be done, and even if, as often in the case of liberal fascism, the effort is very careful to be humane and decent, it will still result in a kind of benign tyranny where some people get to impose their ideas of goodness and happiness on those who may not share them.

“Homer was wrong in saying: ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away.”
—Heraclitus of Ephesus

Jay Nordlinger, at the Corner at NR:

Years ago, when I was living in Washington (D.C.), I was in a bookstore — Kramer Books. (I think they do “KramerBooks” or something — can’t remember. Names are all smashed up like that now, for some reason.) Two youngish men, a clerk and a customer, were discussing a mutual friend — a woman. The clerk said, “Did you hear [So-and-So] had a baby?” The customer said, “No, that’s great. Boy or girl?” The clerk gulped and replied, somewhat rebukefully, “She had a woman.”

One of his readers responds:

Wow — she must have been in labor for days?

Gallup is reporting Obama’s job approval rating at 44%.

The White House is admitting offering three jobs to Andrew Romanoff to persuade him not to run in Colorado.

Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett have been subpoenaed to testify in the Blagojevich corruption trial.

Peter Ferrara is now predicting that Barack Hussein Obama will be forced to resign in disgrace.

Oh no! That means that idiot Biden would become president.

Months ago, I predicted in this column that President Obama would so discredit himself in office that he wouldn’t even be on the ballot in 2012, let alone have a prayer of being reelected. Like President Johnson in 1968, who had won a much bigger victory four years previously than Obama did in 2008, President Obama will be so politically defunct by 2012 that he won’t even try to run for reelection.

I am now ready to predict that President Obama will not even make it that far. I predict that he will resign in discredited disgrace before the fall of 2012.

I can’t see it myself. A president would only resign if he were facing certain impeachment. Why would Republicans be willing to impeach Obama? The impeachment of Bill Clinton backfired on Republicans, and they are unlikely to want to repeat that experience. There is no reason for anyone to prefer Biden to Obama. And Obama shows every sign of continuing the same policies and patterns of behavior which have so devastated his party’s and his own political standing. He is a dead albatross hanging from the socialist party’s neck. Let them keep wearing him.

Michael Barone associates Obama’s political methodology with the aberrant and pathological political culture of his adopted city and argues that the politics of Chicago cannot be successfully implemented on a national level.

An interesting thing about Barack Obama is that he chose, on two occasions, to live in Chicago — even though he didn’t grow up there, had no family ties there, never went to school there.

It was a curious choice. Chicago has a civic culture all its own and one that is particularly insular. Family ties and personal connections are hugely important. Professionals who have lived and worked there for a quarter-century are brusquely reminded, “You’re not from here.”

Nonetheless Obama moved upward in the Chicago civic firmament with apparent ease. The community organizer joined the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church in search of street credibility in the heavily black South Side. The adjunct law teacher made friends around the University of Chicago from libertarian academics to radical organizer William Ayers. The young state senator designed a new district that included the Loop and the rich folk on the Near North Side.

Obama could not have risen so far so fast without a profound understanding of the Chicago Way. And he has brought the Chicago Way to the White House.

One prime assumption of the Chicago Way is that there will always be a bounteous private sector that politicians can plunder endlessly. Chicago was America’s boom town from 1860 to 1900, growing from nothing to the center of the nation’s railroad network, the key nexus between farm and factory, the headquarters of great retailers and national trade associations.

The Mayors Daley have maintained Chicago’s centrality in commerce by building and expanding O’Hare International Airport and by fostering a culture of crony capitalism with the city’s big employers and labor unions. Chicago survived the Depression and recessions to thrive once again. Sure, small businesses and some outfits lacking political connections fell by the wayside. But the system seems to go on forever.

So it’s natural for a Chicago Way president to assume that higher taxes and a hugely expensive health care regime will not make a perceptible dent in the nation’s private sector economy. There will always be plenty to plunder.

Crony capitalism also comes naturally to a Chicago Way president. Use some sweeteners to get the drug companies and the doctors to sign on to the health care plan. If the health insurers start bellyaching, whack them a few times in public to make them go along. Design a financial reform that Goldman Sachs and JPMorganChase can live with even while you assail “Wall Street fat cats.”

The big guys will understand that you have to provide the voters with some political theater while you give them what they want. As for the little guys, well, hey, in Chicago we don’t back no loser. …

To some it may seem anomalous that Obama, who began his Chicago career as a Saul Alinsky-type community organizer, should have taken to the Chicago Way. But Alinsky’s brand of community organizing is very Chicagocentric.

It assumes that there will always be a Machine that you can complain about and that if you make a big enough fuss it will have to respond. And that the Machine can always get more plunder from the private sector.

The problem with Obama’s Chicago Way is that Chicago isn’t America. The Chicago Way works locally because there is an America out there that ultimately pays for it. But who will pay for an America run the Chicago Way?