Splinters-Splinters

Free-Market Medicine—A Personal Account

2012-02-01T09:58:00.000-08:00

When I recently went to Alta Bates hospital for surgery, I discovered that legal procedures take precedence over medical ones. I had to sign intimidating statements about financial counseling, indemnity, patient responsibilities, consent to treatment, use of electronic technologies, and the like.

One of these documents committed me to the following: “The hospital pathologist is hereby authorized to use his/her discretion in disposing of any member, organ, or other tissue removed from my person during the procedure.” Any member? Any organ?

The next day I returned for the actual operation. While playing Frank Sinatra recordings, the surgeon went to work cutting open several layers of my abdomen in order to secure my intestines with a permanent mesh implant. Afterward I spent two hours in the recovery room. “I feel like I’ve been in a knife fight,” I told one nurse. “It’s called surgery,” she explained.

Then, while still pumped up with anesthetics and medications, I was rolled out into the street. The street? Yes, some few hours after surgery they send you home. In countries that have socialized medicine (there I said it), a van might be waiting with trained personnel to help you to your abode.

Not so in free-market America. Your presurgery agreement specifies in boldface that you must have “a responsible adult acquaintance” (as opposed to an irresponsible teenage stranger) take you home in a private vehicle. I kept thinking, what happens to those unfortunates who have no one to bundle them away? Do they languish endlessly in the hospital driveway until the nasty weather finishes them off?

You are not allowed to call a taxi. Were a taxi driver to cause you any harm, you could hold the hospital legally responsible. Again it’s a matter of liability and lawyers, not health and doctors.

One of the two friends who helped me up the steps to my house then went off to Walgreen’s to buy the powerful antibiotics I had to take every four hours for two days. I dislike how antibiotics destroy the “good bacteria” that our bodies produce, and how they help create dangerous strains of super-resistant bacteria. I kept thinking of a recent finding: excessive reliance on medical drugs kills more Americans than all illegal narcotics combined.

So why did I have to take antibiotics? Because, as everyone kept telling me, hospitals are seriously unsafe places overrun with Staph infections and other super bugs. It’s a matter of self-protection.

Two days after surgery I noticed a dark red discoloration on my lower abdomen indicating internal bleeding. I was supposed to get a follow-up call from a nurse who would check on how I was doing. But the call might never come because the staff was planning a walkout. “We have no contract,” one of them had told me when I was in the recovery room. So now the nurses are on strike---and I’m left on my own to divine what my internal bleeding is all about. What fun.

Fortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. A nurse did call me despite the walkout. Yes, she said, it was internal bleeding, but it was to be expected. My surgeon called later in the day to confirm this opinion. Death was not yet knocking.

A few days later, there were massive nurses strikes on both coasts. Among other things, the nurses were complaining about “being disrespected by a corporate hospital culture that demands sacrifices from patients and those who provide their care, but pays executives millions of dollars.” (New York Times, 16 December 2011). One cold-blooded management negotiator was quoted as saying, “We have the money. We just don’t have the will to give it to you” (ibid.).

As for the doctors, both my surgeon and my general practitioner (GP) are among the victims, not the perpetrators, of today’s corporate medical system. My GP explained that it is an endless fight to get insurance companies to pay for services they supposedly cover. Feeling less like a doctor and more like a bill collector, my GP found he could no longer engage in endless telephone struggles with insurance companies.

There are 1,500 medical insurance companies in America, all madly dedicated to maximizing profits by increasing premiums and withholding payments. The medical industry in toto is the nation’s largest and most profitable business, with an annual health bill of about $1 trillion.

Along with the giant insurance and giant pharmaceutical companies, the greatest profiteers are the Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), notorious for charging steep monthly payments while underpaying their staffs and requiring their doctors to spend less time with each patient, sometimes even withholding necessary treatment.

I am without private insurance. And my Medicare goes just so far. Like many other doctors, my GP no longer accepts Medicare. For a number of years now, Medicare payments to physicians have remained relatively unchanged while costs of running a practice (staff, office space, insurance) have steadily increased. So now my GP’s patients have to pay in full upon every visit—which is not always easy to do.

Our health system mirrors our class system. At the base of the pyramid are the very poor. Many of them suffer through long hours in emergency rooms only to be turned away with a useless or harmful prescription. No wonder “the United States has the worst record among industrialized nations in treating preventable deaths” (Healthcare-NOW! 1 December 2011).

Too often the very poor get no care at all. They simply die of whatever illness assails them because they cannot afford treatment. An acquaintance of mine told me how her mother died of AIDS because she could not afford the medications that might have kept her alive.

In Houston I once got talking with a limousine driver, a young African-American man, who remarked that both his parents had died of cancer without ever receiving any treatment. “They just died,” he said with a pain in his voice that I can still hear.

Living just above the poor in the class pyramid are the embattled middle class. They watch medical coverage disappear while paying out costly amounts to the profit-driven insurance companies. I was able to get surgery at Alta Bates only because I am old enough to have Medicare and have enough disposable income to meet the co-payment.

For my out-patient operation, the hospital charged Medicare $19,466. Of this, Medicare paid $2,527. And I was billed $644. The hospital then writes off the unpaid balance thus saving considerable sums in taxes (amounting to an indirect subsidy from the rest of us taxpayers). Had I no Medicare coverage, I would have had to pay the entire $19,466.

I was informed by the hospital that the $19,466 charge covers only hospital costs for equipment, technicians, supplies, and room. So besides the $644, I will have to pay for any pathologists, surgical assistants, and anesthesiologists who performed additional services. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.

How much does my surgeon earn? Not much at all. He gets about $400 to $500 for everything, including my pre-op and post-op visits and the surgery itself, an exacting undertaking that requires skills of the highest sort. He also has to maintain insurance, an office, an assistant, and an increasing load of paperwork.

My surgeon pointed out to me, “If you ask people how much I make on an operation like yours, they will say $4000 to $5000, and be wrong by a factor of ten.” He noted that in a recent speech President Obama criticized a surgeon for charging $30,000 to replace a knee cap. “The surgeon gets a minute fraction of that amount,” my doctor pointed out.

To make matters worse, there is talk about cutting Medicare payments to physicians by 27 percent. If this happens, it is going to be increasingly difficult to find a surgeon who will take Medicare. Still worse, the private insurance companies will join in squeezing the physicians for still more profits.

I was able to meet my payment ($644) not only because my operation was heavily subsidized by Medicare but because it was a one-day “ambulatory surgery.” I don’t know how I would fare if I had to undergo prolonged and extremely costly treatment.

So much for life in the middle class. At the very top of the class pyramid are the 1%, those who don’t have to worry about any of this, the superrich who have money enough for all kinds of state-of-the-art treatments at the very finest therapeutic centers around the world, complete with luxury suites with gourmet menus.

Among the medically privileged are members of Congress and the U.S. president. They pay nothing. They are treated at top-grade facilities. They enjoy, how shall we put it, socialized medicine. No conservative lawmakers have held fast to their free-market principles by refusing to accept this publicly funded, medical treatment.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, cheerfully announced that medical care is not a human right; it should be “market determined just like food and shelter.” Nobody has a higher opinion of John Mackey than I, and I think he is a greed-driven, union-busting bloodsucker. Nevertheless I will give him credit for candidly admitting his dedication to a dehumanized profit pathology.

The U.S. medical system costs many times more than what is spent in socialized systems, but it delivers much less in the way of quality care and cure. That’s the way it is intended to be. The goal of any free-market service---be it utilities, housing, transportation, education, or health care---is not to maximize performance but to maximize profits often at the expense of performance.

If profits are high, then the system is working just fine---for the 1%. But for us 99%, the profit lust is itself the heart of the problem.

Michael Parenti

© Michael Parenti, 2011
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Michael Parenti’s recent books include: The Face of Imperialism (2011); God and His Demons ( 2010); Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2004). For further information, visit: www.MichaelParenti.org .

Bain: Crony and Phony Capitalism

2012-01-14T14:00:00.000-08:00

In the world according to Romney
In this land of milk and honey
Selective memory is best
When belief is put to the test
Though now Mitt’s berated
For saying it’s jobs he created
When in fact he destroyed them
And pensions were crème de la crème
Still, he denounced us as envious
And not himself as devious

All the recent political theater of the Republican primary season makes Broadway and Hollywood seem real. One must suspend disbelief in order to endure a single debate and watch them each push and shove to enter and exit stage far right. Finally, on last Sunday’s performance, “Bain” and “Romney” were used to form a sentence. Romney has touted his extraordinary ability and experience in creating jobs. Let us look at that startling claim to see where it could possibly have arisen. His competitors questioned Mitt’s boast and yet it has been the lynch pin of his campaign. What happens when a company like Bain enters the door of a struggling corporation? It depends. If you are speaking about Bain Venture Capital, then Bain might provide money to expand business or encourage new sector entry or growth. On the other hand, if it is Bain Capital Private Equity at the door, look for a leveraged buyout by a known raider. Also look for the dark side of capitalism where employees are merely pawns that might be fired to enrich Bain. Bain will acquire and then disassemble the company and sell the pieces. It will also examine those assets for potential changes. Normally, a pension fund is a liability in accounting terms since that money is owed employees at some future date. Private equity firms don’t view pensions that way. Those firms, or vulture capitalists, as Rick Perry called them, see pension funds as assets to be saved from the clutches of employees and used for Bain’s profits. That is what happened when Bain bought GST Steel in Kansas City. Bain took much of the pension money for its profit and then the government agency Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation had to bail out the pension fund at the expense of American taxpayers. This should not be used as a boast, but a source of shame for Bain and Romney. Is it capitalism to push liabilities to the government or is it greed and corporate socialism?

The current Romney charge that criticisms of his profiteering are “envy” and not righteous indignation pours salt in the wound that he created. It actually condemns criticism and makes it appear that anybody noting the pain he has caused in thousands of families is due to envy of the people so affected and not to Romney’s unique ethics. In effect, he is also claiming that criticism of his ethics is a criticism of capitalism itself. It is not. It is a criticism of Phony Capitalism that pretends to be taking risks to generate profits, but instead is transferring risks to workers and to the government. It is also heartless because those were real people whom he fired and they supported real families living real lives of suffering and pain that Romney has never experienced. His attempt to express identification with people getting pink slips by saying that he feared a pink slip in his life is an creepy joke given that he has never had to fear any economic threat. Let me cite a few examples.

GST Steel eventually lost all 750 jobs in Kansas City and in no small part because Bain and Romney saddled CST with debt and Bain and Romney essentially confiscated $44 Million from the CST pension fund that later had to be made up by taxpayers through the US government Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). That is a federal bailout going into profits for Bain and the loss of jobs for the steelworkers. Think about it. While corporations normally regard pension funds as liabilities that must be funded, Romney’s Bain saw pension funds as an asset. In accounting, they are on opposite sides of the ledger. In reality, not all the money Romney took was returned by PBGC, so workers each lost about $400/month in their eventual pension benefits. No wonder Romney likes firing people. It means money in his pockets. Romney boasted of creating 100,000 jobs, (80% through Staples), although Bain has never verified that number. He speaks of net/net meaning that all losses have been subtracted from spinoff jobs “created.” Hmm. Romney neglects to mention that the 750 jobs at GST Steel resulted in a cascade of lost jobs at the energy companies and the supply companies that did business with GST. Look closely. Bain and Romney issued bonds after purchasing GST (changing the name from Armco). While making improvements, they also took $36 Million as a dividend to Bain. That is the nature of private equity. Private equity does not create jobs. It creates profit unrelated to jobs. Venture capital is completely different. It may actually create jobs. The jobs lost at GST, were lost by Bain Capital Private Equity, the vulture side of Bain. To show you the balance of business, only about 2.3% of Bain’s business is done by Bain Venture Capital. In other words, vulture capital does over 97% of the business for Bain. Romney has not differentiated between the two nor has he indicated the huge imbalance toward vulture capitalism. Additionally, Bain took its profits directly while socializing losses (as in socialism) by increasing local taxes, increasing borrowing costs for others and using the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to pay greatly reduced pensions to fired workers Was it legal? Yes. Was it ethical? Hmm. Did it create jobs? Probably not here in the USA.

Without going through all the details, Bain essentially did the same maneuver on Ampad by going in and charging Ampad for consulting and having them purchase lots of other office supply companies. In 1992 Bain bought Ampad for $5 Million. In 1993, Ampad had debt of $11 Million. By 1999, Ampad was in debt by $400 Million. Highly leveraged? Worse, Ampad was paying Bain high management fees along the way. Hundreds of employees were laid off and Ampad was put into competition with Staples for the same market while having less purchasing power. Who bankrolled Staples? Why it was Bain, of course. Conflict of interest you say? Not exactly, if your sole interest is making money, there can be no conflict of interest. Are not layoffs and bankruptcy problems? Not for Bain. Bain sold stock and the nearly 400 layoffs were simply a cost of bad management for which Bain was highly rewarded with a profit of over $100 Million. Jobs were outsourced and Bain made money without creating a US job.

Taxes? The Congress in its wisdom taxes profits from raiding companies like Bain Capital Private Equity at 15% not the 35% that you might assume. You may be wondering why “Mittens” has not divulged his tax returns despite calls to do so. He has compared his situation to that of the late Ted Kennedy who had his money in a blind trust meaning that if he divulged his tax return, he would have to reinvest his money in order to avoid interest conflicts in his Senate decisions. Mittens holds no government position so that, even if he had a blind trust then there would be no conflict of interest. How dare you ask? Besides, what if he paid no taxes? That is none of your business.

Now we hear cries from Senator McCain and others that attacking Mittens Romney is directly attacking our fundamental capitalist economic system. I don’t think so. Even the idea that Romney was picking winners and losers while having taxpayers pick up the tab flies against the advertised strength of capitalism of being rewarded for risk without government. Romney has scalded Obama for bailing out GM and Chrysler and yet jobs were saved and workers shared in the process of reducing demands to ensure survival instead of another bankruptcy. He has yet to take responsibility for his heartless creating of weak companies and then devouring the highly leveraged carcasses he created. Employees had no role except as victims. Crony Corporate Socialism as practiced by Romney and Bain should not be confused with Capitalism. Mussolini would love Romney for his corporatism, but we must call it what it is and it does not create jobs. It is essentially high finance with other people’s money. Remember Wall Street that was too big to fail but was bailed out by GW Bush? Conservatism or Corporatism?

Mittens says that any criticism is Romney Envy? No, he really does not get it. Maybe people felt fear or even hate, but envy? Maybe people envied their outsourced jobs? Governor Romney paid corporations incentives for moving to Massachusetts at the expense of taxpayers and the losing states. Mittens needs to level with us and admit that he created lots of profit for himself and Bain, but please, spare us the phony economics lesson on jobs. Just think of this on a national scale. Ouch.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
13 January 2012

The Non-religious Vote

2012-01-04T14:51:00.000-08:00

Americans who are not religious are rarely referred to as voters who have a specific political leaning, or vote as a block. Perhaps this is in part a media slant that perpetuates the myths that non-religious Americans are an insignificant factor or have no specific political viewpoint.

The number of Americans identifying themselves as atheist or agnostic rose from under 2 million in 2001 to 3.8 million in 2008. However, as large as that group is there is a much larger group that are simply not religious. According to a recent American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) “ “…18% (about 40 million Americans) do not profess a belief in a God.”
Regardless of political party some sort of profession of a religious faith is almost mandatory to get elected in America today. We have finally reached the point in our society where being a woman or black is only a slight disadvantage. Being gay or a Muslim is a bigger hurdle to overcome but being openly not religious today in America makes it really hard to get elected even though the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution that there should be no religious test for elected office.
While it is common knowledge that black Christians are heavily Democratic and white Evangelicals are heavily Republican most people don’t know where most non-Christian beliefs fall in the political spectrum.
According to the 2008 PEW Foundation statistical survey their poll was:

Group Republican lean Republican Independent lean Demo Democrat
National 26 10 10 15 32
Evangelical 38 12 9 10 24
Black Church 7 3 6 12 66
Orthodox 27 8 8 18 32
Catholics 23 10 10 15 33
Mormons 52 13 8 7 15
Jews 17 6 8 18 47
Muslims 7 4 10 26 37
Buddhists 10 8 9 30 37
Hindus 6 7 13 22 41
Unaffiated 13 10 15 24 31
Other faiths 7 6 15 29 37

Those who are not affiliated with any religious belief are Democrat or tend toward Democrat by 55% to 23% margin, even though this is a group that Democrats largely ignore. Also, the non-religious, at 15%, have the highest percentage of independent voters of any group. So, there is a large group that could be swayed to vote more Democrat with a little effort.
What surprised me about this survey was how Republican Mormons are. Perhaps this is because of the historical view of the federal government being an intrusive force in their close-knit society. They are much more Republican than Evangelicals. In fact, 34% of Evangelicals tend to be Democrats. I knew black Christians and Jews have traditionally been Democrats, but Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus all lean Democratic by over 60%. It should be no surprise that only 11% of Muslims are Republican considering how often they are demonized by Republicans.

I think that non-religious is a more accurate term than non-believer because the non-religious have their beliefs too. Humanists, Unitarians, Pantheists and for the most part Buddhists certainly have beliefs, but they aren’t religious beliefs. Their beliefs are rooted in philosophy, ethics, human experience and values.

One reason the non-religious are as high as 23% Republican is that many Libertarians are atheists. Ayn Rand was an atheist and many have bought into her whole philosophy. This group is in sharp disagreement with the Humanists and Unitarians who tend to be very liberal and tolerant of other viewpoints and beliefs. A large percentage of Americans for Separation of Church and State are non-religious liberals who believe strongly in maintaining the wall of separation of church and state and that their should be freedom of religion and freedom from religion.

In the PEW survey Hindus and Jews had the highest percentage of college graduates and advanced degrees. I don’t know the statistics but I do know from personal experience in both Humanist and Unitarian groups that most of the people I have known are college graduates. Other beliefs that the PEW survey shows to divide along religious and political lines are a belief in evolution and global warming. In fact, 81% of Buddhists believe in evolution while only 77% of unaffiliated accept evolution although if you only surveyed atheists and agnostics I’m sure the figure would be higher.

What can Democrats learn from this? The most obvious thing, right at the top of the chart, is nationally we have a lot more people who prefer the values the Democrats stand for but its harder to motivate these people to get out and vote in their self interest. Another thing these figures bare out is that just by being inclusive and standing up for the 99% we are attracting a solid majority of non-Christians as well as liberal Christians without even making a concerted effort to win them over. By simply recognizing that non-religious Americans should be treated just like other Americans Democrats will be taking the moral high ground and I believe will benefit politically in the long run.

Dave Silva

Monsanto's Saintly CEO

2012-01-04T14:00:00.000-08:00

Here’s a little addendum to the last post on Monsanto. The CEO of Monsanto is a Brit or a Scot named Hugh Grant; he’s also Chairman and President of what, to hear him tell it, is a corporation modeled on the work of Mother Theresa. That’s if you can ignore the “compensation” he gets for all his good works, including, in 2009, a salary of $10.8 million, and, in 2011, his sale of 150,620 shares of his corporation’s stock at $75 a share, amounting to another $11,296,500 (yes, Monsanto’s stock has done well in recent years, with annual average earnings growth of 19.2% over the last 10 years.) Of course, the business pundits don’t feel any need to ignore the compensation: indeed, they seem to take it as indicative of Grant’s prowess, with Barron’s putting him on its annual “most respected CEO” list in 2009, and Chief Executive Magazine naming him its "CEO of the Year" in 2010.
Grant himself seems to agree. In a speech featured on the Monsanto.com website, he spoke, believe it or not, to the 2010 Business Social Responsibility Conference in New York. He started by raising the specter of population growth—“Between the time you got up this morning and the time you’ll go to bed, there will be 210,000 new people on the plant. By 2050, that’s three new Chinas.” Here, according to Grant, is where Monsanto, the alleged champion of “how to do more with less,” comes in as saviour. For Grant, that’s developing new, more efficient agricultural products, specifically a more “water-efficient Maize” that can transform the low-efficiency African farmer (corn farms yielding only 20 bushels/acre there) into an operator more akin to his high-tech American counterpart (160 bushels per acre). Grant cited a recent trip he made to Malawi, where one Monsanto project giving villagers American hybrid seed produced so much corn the ecstatic villagers had to use the local schoolhouse to store the bumper crop. For Grant, this pointed to two things: first, new partnerships to produce, store and sell the new bumper crops, and second “the promise in a seed, giving people tools we’ve had for 70 years.” Perfect language for the conference Grant was addressing, the BSR being, according to the article, the “largest and most highly-regarded conference in corporate responsibility.”

Just gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it? Seeing Monsanto and its CEO being so socially responsible, so concerned about the poor wogs in Africa, about sustainable agriculture for the newly-starving masses? But wait. What about the great GMO products, the ‘frankenfoods’ Monsanto has pioneered? What about the gathering evidence that the application of increasing quantities of glyphosate to Roundup Ready seeds are undermining the most productive agricultural acreage in the world (the American Midwest) with their deleterious effects on microorganisms upon which all life depends? What about the evidence that crops grown in such conditions and fed to livestock are turning the stomachs of the ruminants into breeding grounds for god-knows-what monstrous organisms? What about Monsanto’s lawsuits against small organic farmers whose fields have been contaminated with GMO seeds—which Monsanto terms an unlicensed use of its patented products? What about Monsanto’s corruption of the USDA, the FDA, the EPA to not only accept this genetic tinkering but to try to force it on farmers worldwide? What about the fact that higher food yields inevitably lead to benighted optimism and increasing populations that soon outstrip the new capacity? Grant mentions none of this. Nor, apparently, does the Business for Social Responsibility Conference, nor Barron’s nor Chief Executive. All simply keep on keeping on with “newspeak”—criminality dressed up in the language of empathy and social responsibility that we’ve come to expect. Forget shame. Forget the truth. All is hype and advertising and the most voracious wolves still, after all these years, safe in their sheep’s clothing, still able to persuade the majority of the sheep that steely fur is wool, that rapacious eyes are loving, that razor teeth are not for slashing and tearing but only for nuzzling.

And the lambs, ah, the lambs are silent.

Lawrence DiStasi

Monsanto's Killing Fields

2011-12-30T15:31:00.000-08:00

I have recently watched an interview with Dr. Don Huber, Emeritus Professor of Plant Pathology at Purdue specializing in microbiology, that will curl your hair (see the whole 57 minute interview at http://capwiz.com/grassrootsnetroots/issue/alert/?alertid=58601501, and/or another shorter interview with Huber at http://vimeo.com/22997532). It deals with Monsanto’s herbicide, Roundup (main ingredient glyphosate), and its growing panoply of Roundup Ready seeds which have been genetically engineered to resist the killing effects of glyphosate, thus allowing farmers to spray Roundup liberally, killing all other plants and allowing the Roundup Ready ones to ‘thrive.’ Roundup Ready seeds now in use include Soy (87% of the worldwide crop), Corn, Canola, Cotton and the recently-authorized-by-USDA Alfalfa and Sugar Beets (despite Huber’s urging to Ag Secretary Vilsack to delay the approval of Roundup Ready Alfalfa). Corporate Agriculture considers this a miracle of American science and a boon to farmers and profits and even our health (with Roundup Ready crops, we are told, fewer pesticides have to be applied; Roundup alone does the job).

Dr. Huber, however, informs us in his dry, unemotional style, that this is not merely a mirage, it is a con, a disaster, a crime against nature itself (my words, not his.) The reasons are legion. To begin with, glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, is, like many other pesticides, a “chelator.” That means it binds or creates a barrier around essential mineral micronutrients which are critical to the very heart of life and growth, especially enzyme function. Most critically, it is not just plants that require enzyme function, all organisms and microorganisms need them. So, to cripple the efficiency of a plant’s mineral uptake is essentially to kill them, and to counteract this killing, Monsanto has genetically engineered seeds whose plants have an alternative pathway for the uptake of some of these essential nutrients. They can ‘survive’ the poison of Roundup thereby. But the key point is this: the plant that gets sprayed with Roundup, even the GMO plant, still gets dosed with large quantities of the Roundup sprayed upon it. So does the soil, with all its microorganisms. Thus you get crops that have glyphosate on and in them (the glyphosate goes to key parts, like the seeds), and soil whose microorganisms are damaged the same way—microorganisms, one of whose main functions is to fight diseases. According to Huber, there are already 40 newly-thriving pathogens on many of our crops—diseases that used to be managed. No more. What’s worse, since these GMO crops—especially corn, soy and alfalfa—are the main feed we give to our stock animals, they too are being affected. A botulism has been seen recently in the intestinal tract of cows because glyphosate in the feed is killing or disabling the normal organisms in the cow’s gut that used to fight it.

Now here is where it gets scary. As noted above, all life employs the same basic mechanisms. So if glyphosate impairs the gut ecology in animals, we can expect that the effect in human stomachs will be similar if not exactly the same. Studies have already been done showing that in virtually 100% of cases, stock animals are showing a deficiency in manganese (needed for its antioxidant properties, its role in protecting plants from disease and its enzyme-activating role in digestion) due to the chelating effect of Roundup Ready feed. There are also studies showing high levels of glyphosate in animal manure (so how use this animal manure on crops???) due to the feed they’re eating (all those Roundup Ready crops, now to include alfalfa), plus some new organism from hell (the electron microscope image of this thing is terrifying) that is suspected of causing reproductive failure in farm animals. First noted by vets in 1998, the fertility failure rate in dairy cattle has reached such proportions—45 to 70%--that dairies now worry about maintaining their stocks (note that Roundup Ready soy and corn were first used as feed in 1998.) And of course, the real killer in all this: though hordes of researchers are trying to identify it, no one yet knows what it is. It seems to be about the same size as a virus, it can be cultured, it is self-replicating, there’s lots of it in GMO corn and soy, but scientists don’t know what it is.

Thus publication about its causes is lagging, but not just for reasons of uncertainty, and here the lugubrious Dr. Huber got as animated as he allows himself to get. Monsanto controls the science in this area. Anyone who does research that is not favorable to its products is either silenced, fired, or prohibited access to all products under patent. Why? because Monsanto makes such research illegal. And the EPA and the FDA and the USDA all go along with it, because the lobby for big agribusiness controls the Congress and all government agencies dealing with such products.

So here’s what we’ve got, folks. We’ve got the most widely-used herbicide in the world killing not only plants (including impairing their ability to fix nitrogen from the air) but essential soil microorganisms and beneficial intestinal organisms in animals. We’ve got GMO crops that allow that product to be used in higher concentrations than ever because we’re told the magic of GMO somehow keeps the stuff off the GMO crop in question, when it doesn’t. And we’ve got symptoms now of some new monster organism that seems to be spreading abortions, infertility and premature aging among the farm animals (not only cattle but chickens, pigs and horses too) on whom we depend. And we haven’t even talked about glyphosate’s proven record as an endocrine disruptor—Huber mentions, in this regard, the notably lowered sperm count of human males, less than half of what it was only 20 years ago. And above all, we have a totally compromised government and its agencies supposedly protecting us, but instead keeping themselves busiest blackballing and outlawing the science and the scientists who have been trying to sound the alarm about all this.

I don’t know about you, but I’m about ready to call for all-out war on Monsanto, on the USDA and Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, and everyone else involved in the monstrous system we have allowed to thrive. I’m about ready to sign on with Lierre Keith, who recently called for serious radical action—whatever force it takes—to bring the entire sick system down. I mean, what else is there to do? Appeal to their better nature? It is to laugh, because these people—the CEOs, the so-called scientists Monsanto employs, the toadies in Congress who protect them to keep their state revenues jangling—are willing to poison every living thing on earth in order to maintain their stranglehold on the markets they have cornered. They care not a whit for life—plant life, microbial life, animal life, human life. They care only about killing. Why should we care about them or their sick, profit-driven lives? Why should we not begin a movement that a recent Newsweek column (Newsweek! imagine) predicted would include the following:

There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. (Michael Thomas, Newsweek, Dec. 28)
And I believe there will. And if it targets any of the evil bastards who work, in any way shape or form, for the devil-spawned corporate monstrosity called Monsanto, I for one will cheer and salute and encourage it until the beast is choked on its own deadly brew.

Lawrence DiStasi

Fantasy in Realpolitik

2011-12-21T14:10:00.000-08:00

Truth is stranger than fiction
In the political charade
Especially in the diction
Of the candidate parade
Where a word may have meaning
Or perhaps not
Depending on your leaning
And if you smoke pot
As hopefuls scratch and fight
While moving to the right

The current overexposure of politicians calling themselves Republicans in a series of reality dramas being called debates is both humorous and scary. It is like Freddy from Friday the 13th fame meeting up with the Three Stooges for an unscripted joint project. As I studied the eight most common participants, their similarity to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became increasingly clear except that nobody in the old fairy tale group of eight was running for president.
Allow me to introduce the group:

Sleazy is Herman Cain who seems to excel in domestic affairs (six and counting), but has trouble with foreign affairs. Is Libya a real country? Iran has high mountains that keep us out, but we need an electric fence to keep immigrants out. He was chosen by God to run.

Sleepy is Jon Huntsman who has trouble keeping up with the comedians in the group but does not want to stir them enough to notice that he is on stage with another Mormon. He wants to be on the far right of the stage, but is too polite to argue.

Dopey is Rick Perry who cannot list more than 2 items without a brain freeze; wants Congress to work part time and he wants to lead the nation if he does not secede from it. He would prosecute the Social Security Administration for its Ponzi scheme. He was chosen by God to run.

Doc is Ron Paul who sees pot as a personal choice as is the creation of an Army. He is the gold standard for eliminating the Fed. He thinks we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in DC are semi-criminal or entirely criminal. MLK Day is annual Hate Whitey Day.

Happy is Mitt Romney who seems delighted that his career of crushing companies and firing employees or cutting their pay qualifies him as a job creator. Healthcare should be supported by a mandate unless it should not be supported by a mandate. Claims he once saw a poor person, but may flip-flop on that.

Bashful is Rick Santorum who wants sex in the closet where it belongs. Life begins at the thought of sex or slightly before. And flag pins make the man unless they don’t. He was chosen by God to run.

Grumpy is Newt Gingrich who wants to return to child labor to lower wages and wants to fire federal judges he disagrees with while nuking Iran and returning to Iraq. Palestinians are an invented people. Campaigns by others should be more civil. Hypocrisy does not include Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac lobbying or his $300,000 House fine for a Jim Wright style ethics lapse.

Snow White is Michele Bachman who claims an Amazing Immaculate Conception for getting both federal and state money for her farm and husband’s “gay cure” clinic while never getting a subsidy. She claims that our founding fathers worked tirelessly to free the slaves despite Mt. Vernon and Monticello. Hmm. Snow White as history dwarf, but chosen by God to run.

It has become obvious that these presidential hopefuls are indeed all dwarfs, not in the sense of physically or genetically affected people, but intellectual and emotional dwarfs who generate bumper stickers that are placed further on the starboard side than any Republicans in history. Barry Goldwater was a Conservative. These candidates are Fascist Looney Tunes that would make Goldwater blush. Let us look at a few ideas that are being promoted and even exaggerated by their rhetoric:

Many candidates have announced that they have been chosen by God to run for president. I don’t know your belief system, but my wager (not $10,000) is that God is much smarter than that. This may be an attempt to secure the Religious Right vote, but it will probably only confuse people who hear voices and not anybody else. In Iowa, as of now, pastors are splitting their support because they are not sure that God spoke or sent a text as he did with Moses. Candidates do not appear to be readers of the New Testament, given their quest for blood and vengeance on the international scene. Despite this drastic policy, for Gingrich and Cain, self-forgiveness trumps all. It may be a sign that King David has replaced Ronald Reagan as Most Dear Leader, especially with Newt the Martyr, who has reinterpreted the Constitution as a quaint preamble to his reign as King of America, Infinity and Beyond. His plan to colonize the moon calls for sending his enemies first to establish the first lunar penal colony. Because of the number of enemies, life support issues are paramount and this may delay the project due to budget constraints.

Snow White has also been chosen by God to run as a serious candidate and to foil Newt the Martyr who has converted to Catholicism and sided with the Pope who is the Anti-Christ. This has confounded non-evangelical pastors and annoyed Catholics and moderate evangelicals who were seeking the True Conservative and they have announced in Iowa that she should step down and endorse Rick Santorum who is male and biologically and morally superior. One might think that after GW Bush announced that God chose him, that candidates might fear not being taken seriously if they followed suit. Snow White claims that her Salem Lutherans never burned witches. It is no surprise that Christine O'Donnell endorsed Romney.

Rick Santorum, being slightly more Catholic than the Pope has simultaneously embraced the theology and scolded the Pope for his slack acceptance of homosexuals as worthy beings. He has denounced Darwin as only a theory and endorsed Intelligent Design. His support of educational vouchers thrills some fellow Catholics, but Intelligent Design has been co-opted by political enemies such as Snow White. Some Republican conciliators have asked Bashful to kiss and make up with Snow White by putting her on his ticket as a Vice Presidential candidate, but kissing leads to sin and he has agreed to briefly shake hands instead.

Doc, or Ron Paul has threatened to run as a Third Party candidate to emphasize his Libertarian credentials. This has split the social conservative factions who support his White is Right statements but have trouble with his policy on marijuana. The Third Party may provide another conflict with Donald Trump who did not make the travel team for the debate tournament. The Donald (not to be confused with the Duck of the same name) has also threatened to run on a Third Party ticket thus creating the real struggle as to which will be Third and which will be Fourth.

Happy has endured campaigning for president twice within memory as well as serious personal privation in his personal and business life. While a missionary in Paris, he was forced to live in an austere hotel that was formerly the embassy for the United Arab Emirates. A chef prepared food, often without input from Mitt and there was hardly room for his bicycle in his hotel closet. The hotel was in the chic “16th” of Paris making it difficult to find the lower middle class he sought to convert. There were so many baths that Happy learned decision-making by choosing the site for his bath to be drawn. It’s not easy being green (with money) and it is emotionally crushing to make millions from layoffs.

Sleepy is in difficult straits. He is sometimes the only adult on stage and he confuses candidates with his bipartisan anecdotes and shows he lacks understanding by suggesting dialogue instead of war on nations not accepting American Exceptionalism defined by Perry, Gingrich and Romney. He lacks the energy to keep the other candidates awake because of his polite demeanor. He leans starboard but talks to Democrats proving that he is unreliable in a fight. His days on the team are limited.

Sleazy has now borrowed a world atlas and is preparing to lower his sights to become the Secretary of Defense. Defense is his preferred positioning and, in fact, he is under Secret Service protection due to credible threats, probably from his wife. He has suspended his presidential campaign until the next debate or sexual allegation, whichever comes first. This may be a clever ploy like the Mohammed Ali “rope-a-dope” trick where he laid low and then punched out his rivals.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
20 December 2011

Incarnation

2011-12-20T11:13:00.000-08:00

As I’ve come to expect in this “Season of Joy,” my mood has been growing more gloomy as the season progresses. Too many “Christmas Specials” with too many expected songs; too many commercials urging us to ‘hurry: only a limited and steadily decreasing number of shopping days left’; too much of the sense that increasingly each year the remembered spirit of this once-holy season becomes more and more degraded by the over-hyped orgy of conspicuous consumption it has become.
Then this morning, a possible turn. Though I have long since abandoned the theology the season supposedly represents—the virgin birth of a God called Jesus in a manger marked by a star—the underlying mystery is both profound and worthy of contemplation. I mean the idea of incarnation. Christian (in my case, Catholic) teaching makes a good deal of this: God comes to earth to save us (that’s the big takeaway) by incarnating: he deigns to become flesh, he takes human shape, as one of us. That’s what the joy is supposed to be about: God himself, or rather, his only begotten son, has come to be us all, to save us all. The problem is that this is hyped as something fantastic, something special, something that has happened only once in history, with the corollary that we, the chosen ones, are the only ones who know this and can thereby benefit from it. That’s where the bullshit creeps in. Because incarnation really is a big deal, only not in the manner of something special, something unique to us fortunate humans of the Christians persuasion, who alone will ride to heaven on its back. No. It’s a big deal because it is the great mystery at the center of all our lives, of all life, of all being. Incarnation. Something becomes flesh. Something that is presumably without substance, i.e. nothing, becomes something. And that is a big deal.

Now humans have long noticed this, have long made it a central mystery. A plant appears out of the ground in the spring. Miracle. Mystery. Repeated millions of times. Millions of fishes sprout from the sea: mystery; gazillions of bugs appear in flight from nowhere, as do thousands upon thousands of birds and gophers and all the beasts of the field. Miraculous, and beneficial to us, mostly, the humans who must depend upon crops and flocks and fishes. And so arise the mystery cults, the stories of Demeter and her child Persephone miming the miracle of birth of all nature in the Spring. And of course, in the Christ story, a child bursts forth from a virgin womb, signifying not only the miracle of human birth, but the mysterious birth of God himself. The mystery of incarnation. The problem is that we now know too much to be awed by this anymore, to genuflect or sacrifice to it anymore. We know how plants arise from seed. We ‘know’ that they convert energy from the sun via photosynthesis, and from the soil via mineral transport, and grow cell by cell. We know how humans and all other animals are conceived, via sperm and egg and growth by cell division, all governed by those helical strands of DNA. So the old mysteries, the pretty stories, become myths—tales told by the ignorant to explain processes too deeply embedded in tiny events for the ancients to perceive. And we abandon them, we replace mystery with the “holidays” whose chief purpose is to get us to spend lavishly and keep feeding an economy which depends for its continuance on the utter stupidity of our buying what neither we nor anyone else needs. (I should say that when I was young many years ago, Christmas still had, at least for us, the quality of need: we got coats or boots or gloves we sorely needed to replace outgrown or worn-out ones; and for something impractical, an orange or tangerine that in winter, in the northeast, still had the aura and taste of a rarity.)

But I digress. I was saying how we’ve abandoned the mysteries that are no longer believable—except I suppose in art, like Handel’s Messiah, which still, despite our knowledge, retains some power. But I digress again. What I meant to say, to remind myself, is that incarnation, even stripped of all its mythological trappings by our science, still radiates power. Indeed, it remains the central mystery. And we can, at least partly, thank science for that too. That’s because while rational science has swept away all the “myths” with its penetrating revelations of biology at the cellular level, when it goes deeper, and it has gone deeper, it brings us right back to the mystery again. Though it has shown us, objectively, what happens at the molecular level and even at the atomic level, at the quantum level things get spooky again, mysterious again. That is to say, at the quantum level, we are now told (and virtually none of us can verify this ourselves) that much of elementary matter—those teeny tiny components of atoms and even electrons, with names like quarks and leptons and gluons and bosons—simply appears out of the void. Matter at its most elementary level, the things of which we are made, simply pop into existence and then pop out again. And we don’t know why. Physicists have, of course, named this. They call it “quantum fluctuation” (see www.newscientist.com , “It’s confirmed: Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations” by Stephen Battersby). They even attribute the birth of the universe, our universe, that is, to quantum fluctuations (no deity needed) which initiated the process leading to the big bang, which burst in this unimaginably fierce explosion to send all those compressed bits careening out into what has become our universe, inflating and expanding faster and faster until gravity gathered things together to produce galaxies and stars and planets and us.

And it all came from incarnation. Matter just popping into existence. Something from nothing. Here is how Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow put it in their recent book, The Grand Design (2010):

Quantum fluctuations lead to the creation of tiny universes out of nothing. A few of these reach a critical size, then expand in an inflationary manner, forming galaxies, stars, and, in at least one case, beings like us. p. 137.
Now I don’t know about most physicists, but to me, that’s pretty mysterious stuff. And it’s not just that I don’t understand quantum mechanics, which I don’t. The truth seems to be that nobody really understands it. There are formulas to explain things, and experiments that seem to prove it works, but when I read that multiple universes (the concept rather makes the word ‘universe’ an oddity) probably sprang from quantum fluctuations and the big bang, and that all those parallel universes probably exist somewhere; or that when particles split through a screen, there is the possibility that though some land where we can identify them, some have probably tripped out to the most distant corners of the universe; or that we and our whole universe may be a holographic projection of some outer surface of a black hole, well then I have to say that the great mystery of incarnation still exists. The great mystery, that is, is and has always been: why there is something rather than nothing? How is there something? Is there a where from which we and all else derive?

This, I think, is really what we should be pondering during this season. Incarnation. Whether we should be joyful about it or not I suppose depends, at least in part, on one’s situation. But it also depends on the very fact of being. It depends on the improbable fact that something rather than nothing exists. It depends on the fact that the void, the vacuum, the nothing has produced and continues to generate, every day, every hour, every second, every millisecond more stuff, more of this improbable glory, more impossible incarnation. And though keeping the stupid economy going does not deserve celebration, this, this continuous mysterious incarnation, this ongoing mystery of the word (or whatever it is) made flesh, surely does.

Larry DiStasi

Occupying Everywhere

2011-12-08T09:07:00.000-08:00

Police nationwide having moved in, at this point (Police on Dec. 7 finally attacked and destroyed the Occupation in downtown San Francisco), the Occupiers in public spaces of dozens and dozens of American cities have been forced to leave. But is this the end, as many have feared?

Not quite. In what some have called the next logical and brilliant move, the Occupiers have shifted their locus (not their focus) to the core of the crisis: bank foreclosures of homes. As Stephen Lerner, an organizer with SEIU, says: “…we’ve occupied public space — now we need to occupy private space that’s been stolen by banks.” Sean Barry of VOCAL-NY adds: “One of our messages is that there’s more empty homes that banks are sitting on than there are homeless families.”

Still, some might think, ‘oh, foreclosures; that’s old hat, a story that’s over.’ But it isn’t. According to many insiders, the banks have yet to foreclose on the majority of homes in the U.S., perhaps as many as 4 million more. More than that, the AP reports in its story on foreclosure occupations that “Nearly a quarter of all U.S. homeowners with mortgages are now underwater, representing nearly 11 million homes” (CT Post, December 6). That’s 11 million homes, folks, 1 out of 4. Talk about the Great Depression. Which is what, by the way, Rachel Maddow did on a recent MSNBC show (well worth watching). As an introduction to her sympathetic segment on the Occupy Foreclosures movement, she showed news reports and movie clips of exactly the same kind of resistance during the early 1930s when millions of Americans were losing their homes and farms. Huge crowds would show up and resist not just passively or peacefully, but by first putting the furniture that had been removed by authorities back into the homes, and then by throwing rocks and utensils and farm implements at police arriving to enforce the evictions. These people were pissed off and they were serious.

So, it seems, are today’s occupiers. The AP report cited above claims that homes in more than 25 cities were involved in Tuesday’s protests. And more are on the way. Said one of the Seattle organizers: “It's pretty clear that the fight is against the banks, and the Occupy movement is about occupying spaces. So occupying a space that should belong to homeowners but belongs to the banks seems like the logical next step for the Occupy movement.” In response, Seattle police spokesman Sean Whitcomb insisted that occupying private property represented the same violation—trespassing—that occupying public space did. The police response, and the penalties, would be the same. But the occupiers are unfazed. In Atlanta, protesters disrupted a home auction of foreclosed properties with whistles and sirens. Several individual home foreclosures have already been stopped, and the evictees given more time to try to work out a deal with the banks. One woman in Cleveland expressed gratitude to the occupiers, who came and camped out in tents in her backyard, frightening off officials who were supposed to come and evict her. She was still in her home on December 6 (see Maddow video). Moreover, the Occupiers have joined forces with groups that have been active for several years (Take Back the Land, Viva Urbana) in defending homes against evictions—supplying fresh and enthusiastic troops for the earlier efforts. The movement also derives encouragement and tactics from movements in other countries like Spain, where the 15M movement has stopped hundreds of evictions and occupied vacant buildings.

That this movement has moral authority can be seen by what NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in a recent interview with a Chase banker named Theckston:

He (Theckston) says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.
These less-savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up. (Kristof cited by Sarah Seltzer, Alternet, Dec. 5)
We’ve all heard accusations about this type of cruel and intentional fraud, but to hear an admission of it of from one of the bankers involved is stunning.

This—the moral authority they have, both currently and historically—is why the Occupy movement has the powers-that-be scrambling for ways to de-legitimize it. I mentioned in my last blog the rumor about a public relations firm being hired by bankers. More recently, Republican talking-points guru, Frank Luntz, expressed his concern about it to the Republican Governors Association meeting in Orlando: “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” he said, and offered 10 tips on what specific language to use to counter it. First and foremost, “Don’t say ‘capitalism.’ Use ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market’ instead.” Now this is really interesting: even the Republicans are admitting that the American public now thinks ‘capitalism’ is immoral! And if Republicans are seen as “defenders of ‘Wall Street’,” says Luntz, “we’ve got a problem.”

Karl Marx must be smiling. Imagine, the Republican Party, that bastion of mindless boosterism, is running away from capitalism as a concept. Moreover, Luntz also advises Repubs not to say government ‘taxes the rich;’ instead say government ‘takes from the rich,’ because Americans respond favorably to ‘taxing the rich.’ By God, I sure hope the clueless, pusillanimous Democrats have read this. Because Luntz urges other verbal subterfuge as well, and all reflect two things: the Republicans are vulnerable and scared (as well they should be, their policies having brought this nation to the brink of disaster), and at the other end, have thoroughly absorbed the lessons of the TV age about framing a message properly, while Democrats have not. Now, finally, there’s a golden opportunity to hang the Republicans with the real message and practice they and their financial masters have been promoting for years: advancing the cause of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

So far, the only element in the nation that has understood this, and been willing to act on it, are the Occupiers. We can only hope that the American people in ever greater numbers will begin to get it as well, and that the hapless talking heads they elect to public office will follow. The only question is, how much of everywhere has to be occupied and how many of the rest of us have to jailed before the worm turns?

Lawrence DiStasi

Occupy, Occupy, Here Comes Occupy

2011-11-20T15:02:00.000-08:00

I’ve been wanting to comment on the #Occupy movement for quite some time, but events keep outrunning my prose. That’s still true today. So this is just going to be some disjointed musings to emphasize how delighted I am with these young people—the ones who’ll have to live in the mess we’ve created—and how crucial I think their movement is. Just consider: a few weeks ago, the wacky right seemed firmly in command of the entire political spectrum. Obama was reeling from hits to every one of his proposals, no matter how lame. All we heard was the Tea Party and the rantings and ravings of the Republican pretenders to the White House: Tweedledum and Tweedledumber-by-the-minute (I mean really, has there ever been such a gathering of cruel, incompetent morons in a presidential primary?)

Now, though, the #Occupy movement in city after city has changed all that. Just this morning, for example, I read a piece about the latest initiative in Congress: Ted Deutch, (D-FL) has offered a constitutional amendment (he calls it OCCUPIED: Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy) to affirm that “rights protected by the Constitution belong to human beings, not to for-profit corporations or other business entities.” It would “prohibit business corporations and their associations from using money or other resources to influence voting on candidates or ballot measures anywhere in America.” Amazing. The Democrats in Congress are clearly feeling the heat from the occupiers, and some, at least, are starting to find some damn backbone.

Of course, it won’t be enough. But this is what such movements are supposed to do: change the debate, and force legislators to act rather than hide behind mealy-mouthed rhetoric. And just before this, I watched a video of a few dozen occupiers marching—on foot, along the highway where people can stop and congratulate them—from New York to Washington. They plan, according to some of their interviews, to barge in on the deadlocked “Super Committee” that’s supposed to be coming up with compromise measures to reduce the deficit. Of course, this “stupor committee” will do nothing of the kind, but the occupiers are pushing ahead, getting some press, and dramatizing the determined inaction of the U.S. Congress.

Even before that, I read the beautiful op-ed written (NY Times)by former poet laureate Robert Hass about his encounter with the police at UC Berkeley’s occupy gathering last week. In brief, Hass and his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, decided to monitor police behavior the night they were to remove the occupiers from UC’s Sproul Plaza. Instead, the Hass’s found themselves stuck in a crowd being forced together, and when Hillman sought to engage a policeman in dialogue, he struck her to the ground, also striking Hass when he tried to come to her aid. Hass, nursing bruised ribs, decries the militaristic tactics of the Darth Vader forces that have attacked, without provocation, the occupiers from New York to Denver to Oakland to San Francisco in what many see as a coordinated attempt to intimidate the occupiers, break their movement, and discourage any others who might be thinking of joining them. It hasn’t worked so far. Each broken-up demonstration has simply come back stronger—a fact we learned in the 60s, i.e. that inducing the authorities to overreact is part of revolutionary strategy. And these days, i.e., post-9/11, one hardly has to induce at all. The militarized police forces—the equipping of whom has become a booming industry for America’s military-industrial complex—seem to all be either on hair-trigger alert, or specifically instructed to beat the hell out of a few hundred demonstrators, regardless of provocation or law-breaking, to send a message. Fortunately, the message is having the opposite effect. Police brutality is encouraging, rather than discouraging more people to join the movement. And if polls are correct, millions of Americans, like myself, are cheering them on from the sidelines.

The police will, and already have scaled back their brutalities—especially after the horrific video of a helmeted officer walking calmly back and forth spraying pepper gas directly on a sitting group of UC Davis students blocking a sidewalk; which spraying called forth condemnation and an investigation by the UC Davis Chancellor. But things have gone very far already, and the police, like all authorities, are fixed in their attitudes. Crowds threaten them. Protest types disgust and alarm them. Used to intimidating, used to immediate compliance with their orders no matter how unreasonable, their responses are virtually automatic (their force has been rationalized by one spokesperson who said “linking arms is a form of violence”). Indeed, the conflict between police/soldiers and unarmed demonstrators has become the emblem of our time—in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Yemen, in Burma, in Libya, in Syria. The only question in any such situation is how far these “upholders of law and order” will go to snuff out the legitimate cries of the suffering.

And this is why, in the end, the #Occupy movement is so important. Ordinary people, mostly young people, are demonstrating that the situation—of inequality, of organized theft, of corporate malfeasance, of ecological disaster—has become so dire that they are willing to put their bodies on the line to change not just rhetoric, but everything. Even former lawmen—I know of two who have recently joined the occupiers, Ray Lewis, former police chief of Philadelphia (arrested), and Norm Stamper, former police chief of Seattle—are adding their voices to the rising chorus. Where all this will end is anybody’s guess: it could fizzle in the cold and wet. But one thing is sure. Those in power are taking note, and planning furiously to deflect the movement, infiltrate the movement, discourage and discredit the movement (this just in: Reader Supported News is reporting that a well-known DC Lobbying Firm has proposed an $850,000 plan to conduct ‘opposition research’ on the Occupy Movement and construct ‘negative narratives’ about it. See it at readersupportednews.org). There is fear in their hearts, because they know that the movement has focused on the one truth that cannot be denied: We really are the 99%, and without our cooperation, they cannot maintain their exploitation of the masses. For that alone, I salute the occupiers. And hope, when the time is ripe, to join them.

Lawrence DiStasi

Wake-up time?

2011-11-09T15:43:00.000-08:00

I have to confess that I didn’t go to the polls yesterday, having glanced at the sample ballot to find mostly school bond issues of little interest to me now. But across the country, what an election it was. Though it may be too much to hope, it seems that our great unwashed may finally be waking up to the fact that capitalist democracy, in its present form, is not going to save them. Rather, the oligarchs and banksters and Wall Street billionaires now in control of both the economy and the political process will never be satisfied until they have ground the faces of the working classes into the dirt, stripped them of all dignity, and forced them to shut up, watch the circus, and become slaves. But wait: enter the Wall Street occupiers who, contrary to all expectations, seem to have changed the conversation, and now, voters across the country have shown that they, too, are fed up.

In Ohio, where Governor John Kasich had emulated his Republican counterpart in Wisconsin by pushing a law, SB 5, that stripped public sector unions of their right to collectively bargain, the voters repealed the law in a huge victory for union rights. Over 60% of voters stood with nurses, teachers, policemen and firefighters in a victory that had the Ohio governor sheepishly acknowledging that he had “heard the voters.” I just bet he did. I bet the smart-ass governor of Wisconsin heard too. Perhaps even the billionaire Koch brothers, who financed much of this concerted Republican attack on workers, heard it as well. Because this wasn’t the only reversal for the conservatives who just months ago appeared poised to take over the whole nation.

No. Progressive victories took place in several more states, including Maine, Mississippi, Iowa, Arizona and North Carolina. Something is happening here, Mr. Jones. In Maine, the people voted to maintain their same-day voter registration policy after the right-wing legislature had passed a law to repeal it—employing their usual argument about “voter fraud.” The people didn’t believe it, saw it as disenfranchisement, and yesterday took their right back. In Mississippi, voters struck back on a different front, rejecting another attempt by fundamentalists to pass a constitutional amendment granting “personhood” to a “fertilized egg.” That’s right. On the one hand, these right-wing bozos grant personhood to corporations; on the other, to “fertilized eggs”, thus putting at risk not just abortions, but even birth control. Even benighted voters in Mississippi said “no thanks” thank god.

But my two favorites, at least in the U.S., were Arizona and Missoula, Montana. In Arizona, the Republican state Senator who had pushed the state’s nasty immigration bill, SB 1070, one Russell Pearce by name, was recalled. Tossed out of office. The gopher for the notorious American Legislative Council (ALEC)—funded by corporate special interests including the aforementioned Koch Brothers—Pearce this morning was talking about having to re-examine his options after his big defeat. Which probably means figuring out how to maintain his racism by putting a more palatable face on it. No matter. He’s gone and SB 1070 should be toast. The Koch brothers suffered another defeat in Wake County, North Carolina where voters defeated four conservative school board candidates backed by the Koch’s “Americans for Prosperity” who wanted to get rid of the district’s diversity policies. In other words, to re-segregate the schools. The voters said no, and replaced them with Democrats. Why, it might even be called morning in America!

Finally, in Missoula MT, (site, incidentally, of the camp where Italian Americans were interned during WWII), citizens passed a resolution proposing to amend the U.S. Constitution to END CORPORATE PERSONHOOD. To me, this is potentially the most important victory of all. This is because the absurd notion that corporations are actually persons, with all the First Amendment rights granted to human beings by the U.S. Constitution—including and specifically free speech (the basis for the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United granting corporations complete freedom to throw money at any and all candidates for public office without restrictions)—makes a mockery of democracy itself. Corporations are fictitious entities. Persons organize themselves into corporations specifically to limit their liability as individual humans in business dealings. That limited liability is granted because it allows corporations to do what individuals cannot—so to then turn around and grant a fiction with immunity the same protections as vulnerable humans is an absurdity. Further, the Supreme Court itself never actually decided on this issue; it was a clerk working for the court, J.C. Bancroft Davis, who added a headnote to the 1886 Santa Clara case that assumed the personhood of corporations—a headnote that slipped by and became precedent ever after. In other words, corporate personhood should never have had the force of law. Since it does, however, the remedy is to pass a constitutional amendment to bring the situation back to where the Founders—Jefferson, Madison, and others who insisted that it was the people who needed protection from corporations—initially put it. Humans have human rights. Corporations do not, except in the fictitious world established in the United States in recent years. As one sign in the Occupy movement put it, “I’ll believe corporations are persons when Texas executes one.” It is time to abolish this so-called right, and the voters of Missoula, Montana took a first step. My hope is that before too long, the entire nation will wake up as well, and take the necessary actions to put corporations and their power back in the bottle where they belong. If, that is, it isn’t already too late—which it will be if now all of Italy comes undone (Berlusconi’s downfall another victory), joining Greece, and the whole Eurozone follows suit. Then, it might be too late not only to save Europe, but to save capitalism as well.

First things first, though, and today we can raise a glass to some small, but significant victories. May they continue.

Lawrence DiStasi

Why America Needs a Single Payer Healthcare System

2011-11-03T14:25:00.000-07:00

Although the 2010 Healthcare Act provided many improvements it failed to pass a public option for a single payer healthcare plan that would cover everyone. Most Democrats wanted the universal health care every other developed country in the world has. We believe the goal of health care should be to keep people healthy not just to make profit for corporations.

This year about 100,000 people will die in America because they are uninsured, or underinsured. Every 30 seconds someone in this country goes bankrupt because of medical expenses even though 60% of those with medical debt had insurance. In the rest of the developed world people don’t go bankrupt because they get sick.

Only America has for profit HMOs. Some of the problems with for profit HMOs is big executive bonuses, denying claims simply to increase profits and running television ads that needlessly increase costs. They limit what doctors you can see and they tell doctors what treatment they will pay for. They make the cost of health care so high compared to other countries that it both reduces worker’s income and makes American products less competitive in the global market.

Under single payer, like Medicare for all, everyone would be covered and we could demand fair prices from the drug companies. There would be an enormous savings in administrative costs and paperwork. While Medicare’s administrative costs are 1.5 to 2% HMOs are between 20 and 30%. According to Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org). “Single payer would save $400 billion a year, enough to provide comprehensive, high quality health care for all Americans.” The U. S. spends twice as much, $8,160 per capita, as other industrialized nations. Spending so much hasn’t made us healthier. The World Health Organization ranks France and Italy one and two and America 37th, Europeans and Japanese live longer and are less obese.
Our health care system is unaffordable. It is like a hidden tax on Americans that keeps going up faster than inflation and draining our resources. The rest of the world knows what works; its single payer. No other country is looking to adopt our failed system.

Dave Silva

3 November 2011

9-9-9: New Sign of the Beast

2011-10-26T18:03:00.000-07:00

Revelation tells of the sign of the Beast
Where the unknowing lose all their money
And worship numbers to get to the feast
Implanting microchips in foreheads: how funny
But what if this scripture was read on its head
Would the number be upside-down?
Undoing all that you’ve read
Displaying a new circus and clown
Instead of updating the ancient fixes
For fighting the onslaught of sixes
We should be using these times
To tell the world about nines

In this political world of bumper sticker mentality and easy solutions to complex problems, we have found a new leader in the conservatives who are raising Cain. Herman Cain. Herman has stated that 9-9-9 is the way to prosperity. For whom, Herman? 9-9-9 means that we would have a 9% corporate income tax, a 9% individual income tax and a 9% national sales tax. There would be no exemptions…well maybe a few. And there would be no sales tax on used goods. You probably see where this is going. You want to buy a new car but do not want to pay tax on it. I am a Chevrolet dealer who wants to sell you a Chevrolet. I “use” the Chevrolet by driving it around the block and declare it used. What a deal! You pay no tax but pay full price and “big government” is none the wiser although somewhat poorer. The tax collection for my Chevy franchise is reduced to zero since I have been selling only used cars and 9% of nothing is nothing. I have nothing to report. Hmm. The loopholes begin. How do we define used? If I rebuild an auto, would that be “used?” What happens to the economy that does not build new homes and cars? That is clearly one of the myriad problems to begin, but 9-9-9 will reduce tax income for our republic. Reduced income for the republic means fewer services including fire, police, medical, parks, roads, waterways, safety and health inspections, etc. This reduction will have the effect of increasing air and water pollution because we will have fewer inspectors and more people will suffer from cancer, emphysema and environmental diseases. Aircraft will have reduced oversight and inspection resulting in more “accidents.” Roads will become deadlier. Death and disease from food contamination will rise. Fewer services equates to real everyday hazards for most of us. This same process is true for the income and corporate taxes. There is no free lunch although there may be beneficiaries for this policy. The Koch brothers have earned the reputation of the Patrons of Pollution and have amassed a record of coal sludge pollution of 2.6 million cubic yards of coal ash sludge that were released into the Emory River in Tennessee; air and groundwater pollution through Georgia-Pacific Industries in Crossett, Arkansas recently cited for extremely and abnormally high cancer rates among its neighbors. The Koch brothers have initiated a full court press to kill the EPA, and they have paid direct support dollars to House Republicans willing to defang or eliminate the EPA. These are the same Koch brothers that have received $2.3 Billion in tax breaks in Washington. In other words, they have severely damaged our environment and the people living in it and have been given tax breaks by the people who benefit by political contributions from the same Koch brothers. Now what could this possibly have to do with 9-9-9 and raising Cain?

Actually, Herman Cain has been on David Koch’s payroll since at least 2005 through Americans for Prosperity, a front organization wholly owned and run by the Kochs. Incidentally, so has Rich Lowrey who is the author of the 9-9-9 scheme (and not an economist; has a bachelor’s degree in accounting and works in a branch for WellsFargo). So given this, is Cain the stealth candidate for the Kochs? My answer is a resounding “YES.” A vote for Cain is a vote for the Koch brothers and their hirelings (Rich Lowrey, Mark Block, et. al.). Mark Block, the cigarette smoker in the new Cain advertisement is Cain’s nominal campaign manager. Block was fined $15,000 for illegal campaign activity in Wisconsin and has been linked with voter suppression there. He is also on the Koch payroll. Cain was also paid by the Kochs for his speaking engagements for the “Prosperity Expansion Project” from 2005-2006. A vote for Cain is a vote for deadly pollution, not only in Wisconsin, but in Arkansas where Georgia-Pacific in 2010 released over 913,000 pounds of toxic chemicals in the air and 136,000 pounds of toxins in waterways and deposited 444,000 pounds in the soil. Formaldehyde is a major carcinogenic emission there. Additionally, in Louisiana, across the border from the Crossett plant, there is an investigation due to contamination of the Quachita River that flows from Arkansas. The Koch brothers and Herman Cain appear to be joined philosophically at the hip and at the bank as are Senator Vitter (the hooker chaser from Louisiana) and many “conservative” Republicans. Vitter has delayed the Quachita investigation.

Let us look a bit more closely at 9-9-9. It is a wet dream for the wealthy and a nightmare for middle and lower class citizens. The billionaire Koch brothers would see their total personal taxes reduced from about 28% to about 11% on average and their corporate taxes perhaps less than 9% when the loopholes are applied. The wage collecting American worker would see his take home pay reduced sharply when he must pay 9% on income (regardless how little he earns) and again must pony up an additional 9% on Federal sales taxes over and above the state and local sales taxes now in force. Actually, it is worse than that because states would receive less support from the federal government because the total federal tax income will be drastically reduced with this 9% limit. As a result, the states and local governments would be forced to increase their state income and sales taxes. So if you were making $ 1 Million per year, your federal contribution would be $90,000 and you would be left with only $910,000. However, if you made $10,000 per year, then you would be left with $9100 before you bought groceries, paid the rent, paid for transportation and wondered how you would ever escape poverty. Your sales tax alone would be a minimum of 18.5 % in California before it increased for the reasons cited above, even if the state did not increase your payroll taxes. The poor do not have that slack. The middle would become poor. The policy is massively regressive.

It is indeed strange that the far right has taken on the prophesies of Revelation that talk about weird mixes of technology with old fashioned fear mongering. Many religious right-wingers actually believe that our money will be no good and that we may already have implants in our foreheads or right hands (symbolic, maybe?) to conduct our money transactions. It is fundamentalist snake oil. It is dangerous and hardly worthy of being considered as an item of faith although, if followed, it could approximate the conditions of last days as the Bible suggests. We could bring it on ourselves.

As a friend recently reminded me, our response to 9-9-9 should be Nein-Nein-Nein. “No-No-No” in German. Bumper stickers are short and pithy, but they do not convey the disaster about to strike our United States should 9-9-9 become policy. You are not calling out for pizza delivery, you are voting to establish a fair tax and incentive policy that will help the nation and all the people grow while remaining healthy, safe and competitive in an international marketplace. The Koch brothers are in the top 4 wealthiest billionaires in America. What appears to be good for them may literally choke the rest of us or kill us through cancer or poverty. Friends don’t let friends vote for annihilation.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
26 October 2011

Class Warfare Indeed

2011-10-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

Over the last two decades or more, Republicans have been denouncing as “class warfare” any attempt at criticizing and restraining their mean one-sided system of capitalist financial expropriation.

The moneyed class in this country has been doing class warfare on our heads and on those who came before us for more than two centuries. But when we point that out, when we use terms like class warfare, class conflict, and class struggle to describe the system of exploitation we live under—our indictments are dismissed out of hand and denounced as Marxist ideological ranting, foul and divisive.

Amanda Gilson put it perfectly in a posting on my Facebook page: “[T]he concept of ‘class warfare’ has been hi-jacked by the wrong class (the ruling class). The wealthy have been waging war silently and inconspicuously against the middle and the poor classes for decades! Now that the middle and poor classes have begun to fight back, it is like the rich want to try to call foul---the game was fine when they were the only ones playing it.”

The reactionary rich always denied that they themselves were involved in class warfare. Indeed, they insisted no such thing existed in our harmonious prosperous society. Those of us who kept talking about the realities of class inequality and class exploitation were readily denounced. Such concepts were not tolerated and were readily dismissed as ideologically inspired.

In fact, class itself is something of a verboten word. In the mainstream media, in political life, and in academia, the use of the term “class” has long been frowned upon. You make your listeners uneasy (“Is the speaker a Marxist?”). If you talk about class exploitation and class inequity, you will likely not get far in your journalism career or in political life or in academia (especially in fields like political science and economics).

So instead of working class, we hear of “working families” or “blue collar” and “white collar employees”. Instead of lower class we hear of “inner city poor” and “low-income elderly.” Instead of the capitalist owning class, we hear of the “more affluent” or the “upper quintile.” Don’t take my word for it, just listen to any Obama speech. (Often Obama settles for an even more cozy and muted term: “folks,” as in “Folks are strugglin’ along.”)

“Class” is used with impunity and approval only when it has that magic neutralizing adjective “middle” attached to it. The middle class is an acceptable mainstream concept because it usually does not sharpen our sense of class struggle; it dilutes and muffles critical consciousness. If everyone in America is middle class (except for a few superrich and a minor stratum of very poor), there is little room for any awareness of class conflict.

That may be changing with the Great Recession and the sharp decline of the middle class (and decline of the more solvent elements of the working class). The concept of middle class no longer serves as a neutralizer when it itself becomes an undeniable victim.

“Class” is also allowed to be used with limited application when it is part of the holy trinity of race, gender, and class. Used in that way, it is reduced to a demographic trait related to life style, education level, and income level. In forty years of what was called “identity politics” and “culture wars,” class as a concept was reduced to something of secondary importance. All sorts of "leftists" told us how we needed to think anew, how we had to realize that class was not as important as race or gender or culture.

I was one of those who thought these various concepts should not be treated as being mutually exclusive of each other. In fact, they are interactive. Thus racism and sexism have always proved functional for class oppression. Furthermore, I pointed out (and continue to point out), that in the social sciences and among those who see class as just another component of “identity politics,” the concept of class is treated as nothing more than a set of demographic traits. But there is another definition of class that has been overlooked.

Class should also be seen as a social relationship relating to wealth and social power, involving a conflict of material interests between those who own and those who work for those who own. Without benefit of reason or research, this latter usage of class is often dismissed out of hand as “Marxist.” The narrow reductionist mainstream view of class keeps us from seeing the extent of economic inequality and the severity of class exploitation in society, allowing many researchers and political commentators to mistakenly assume that U.S. society has no deep class divisions or class conflicts of interest.

We should think of class not primarily as a demographic trait but as a relationship to the means of production, as a relationship to power and wealth. Class as in slaveholder and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and worker. Class as in class conflict and class warfare.

And who knows, once we learn to talk about the realities of class power, we are on our way to talking critically about capitalism, another verboten word in the public realm. And once we start a critical discourse about capitalism, we will be vastly better prepared to act against it and defend our own democratic and communal interests.

Michael Parenti

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Michael Parenti is an internationally known, award winning author and scholar. Included among his recent books are The Face of Imperialism (2011), Democracy for the Few 9th ed. (2011), and God and His Demons (2009).

The Inhuman Side of Enterprise

2011-10-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

Ah, the human side of enterprise
Has long been taught in schools
Where love for work is a prize
And slackers are but fools
Except in the mind of the “employers”
Who do not accept humanity
And become the destroyers
Of life and limb and sanity
To prove that men are but cogs
Without worth or soul
Except to cut wood from the logs
And to spend time on parole
In jobs that are becoming the dregs
Yet without which a grown man begs

Back in the dark ages of 1960, a fresh voice supported by research and understanding proposed a new concept for the workplace. His theory of work and motivation was that people did not have to be coerced to work and that work itself is inherently satisfying; that work was as natural as play and that systems for production should recognize this essential humanity. McGregor postulated that managers and employers held basic assumptions of their employees. Those who held “Theory X” assumptions felt that work was not natural and that people had to be coerced to work or given extrinsic rewards that paid them directly for their efforts; that they had to be watched and monitored by systems and supervisors to stay on task and get work done. Those managers and employers holding “Theory Y” assumptions held beliefs that work itself had intrinsic rewards and that it was as natural as play; that if people were trusted with work tasks, they would monitor and manage themselves to get work done and that they resented coercion. McGregor was a product of Detroit and understood the stress of assembly line production. He also worked at several levels from senior management to gas station attendant when we had such work. Although he began studies in Detroit, he initially left college for the world of work and then resumed studies at Harvard where he got an MA and a PhD. On graduating, he moved to MIT, a matter of a few hundred yards, and began serious work on motivational studies with some of the best minds in the nation. He later was President of Antioch College at age 41 and he then returned to the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He died relatively young at age 58.

Essentially, McGregor was the first serious and qualified manager and educator who postulated that the assumptions a manager makes actually affect the outcome of production and the support of workers in the cause of production. How you, as a manager, feel about workers affects the way that workers respond to your style based upon those assumptions. Apparently some in Congress have not read McGregor or still feel that business ownership includes total control of employees as in the days of Charles Dickens. Allow me to relate the story of a close friend who experienced the real results of management under the conditions of mistrust and arbitrary leadership.

The curtain opens in an office of a property casualty insurance company in the Northeast that was, at the time, a subsidiary of CIGNA (Connecticut General). In its early days, this company wrote insurance on slaves just as Aetna Life and Casualty did during the mid 1800s. The major difference between these two companies, besides size, was that Aetna Life and Casualty wrote life insurance on slaves. “Little Aetna,” unrelated to AL&C, wrote property insurance on slaves. To call Little Aetna conservative is hyperbolic understatement. Little Aetna was a reactionary throw back to the 19th century. As a single point of reference, when the women of Little Aetna petitioned to change the name of the “Aetna Girls Club” to “the Aetna Women’s Club,” the women were rebuffed, and this is in the late 1970s. One day early in my friend’s tenure at Little Aetna, his boss called him in to his office for a confidential talk. “I believe that trainer “Susan” spends too much time in the ladies room. I want you to log in all her time in the restroom and to put a stop to her lazy habits.” Now, “Susan” is black and also the most productive of five management trainers. My friend is in a quandary because of the possibility that monitoring her toilet time might backfire as a productivity issue as well as a racial sensitivity issue. He chose to talk with “Susan” who claimed that she brought her work into the restroom because one of the other trainers was a total distraction and that she could not sit by her and avoid constant conversation. Her professional work bore that out. Things then got worse. My friend’s secretary reported to him that management was rummaging through his desk drawers after hours looking for something (union affiliation evidence/my friend was not a union member). Finally, they brought in the company attorney and fired him alleging lack of output. My friend then filed an Open Line complaint to CIGNA. The CIGNA investigation showed that his unit had higher productivity than the technical training unit and recommended rehiring only to be told that Little Aetna would rather risk lawsuit than concede.

My friend left the company and went where he was wanted. No surprise there. A few years later at Christmas, the Little Aetna President resigned without warning. On the first business day of the following year, all 4,000 employees were fired. For two years prior to that calamity, CIGNA had touted the property casualty job opportunities that awaited Aetna employees at INA in Philadelphia, but failed to hire or transfer any employees. When queried by the press, CIGNA simply stated that they did not want the employees to let down their efforts or conduct sabotage. Instead, they created a fiction that opportunities would be greater rather than eliminated. It was like the movie line from “A Few Good Men.” “You can’t handle the truth!” Employees were not told the truth that might have allowed them to get jobs. There were record heart attacks, suicides and strokes among the 4,000 because a company applying clear Theory X assumptions assumed that the employees were like destructive children who had to be protected from the truth, lest they sabotage Aetna. Many employees were older and deprived of their pensions meaning that they might not find work for months if at all. The trump card was unemployment insurance. Aetna was still liable for that compensation along with the employees (for 180 days). Is this beginning to sound familiar? Now what about those who were unable to find work after 180 days? Were they lazy as the company assumed? Does the government owe them anything to protect their homes, health and families? Just what happens to a breadwinner (man or woman) who cannot find work and has the responsibility to feed, clothe and house a family? Is it simply another day when their self-image, health and identity as well as that of their families are destroyed?

Today, this nation is experiencing record unemployment, record corporate profits along with the monetary and human pain and suffering that comes with extended periods without living-wage work. The House political extremists want to cut off unemployment compensation saying it is a counter-motivation for people to find work. I have personally known hundreds who have lost work and have yet to find one that so preferred it that way so as to stop searching for work. That is a serious Theory X assumption about people that will cause further pain, displacement and grief for them and all their friends and family. Work is what keeps body and soul together. To do what the extreme right threatens will damage our nation as well as the psyche of the workers directly affected and those who depend upon them. Enterprise cannot be permitted to be inhuman without catastrophic and long lasting results.

By the way, that friend of mine was actually me. How does it feel to have been treated as a mushroom (kept in the dark and fed bullshit)? Lies are never for the good of the employee or the reader. Lies hide the people from knowledge and actions they might take to improve their lives. Don’t let the House lie about employee motivation or extending unemployment benefits. Write them for your own good and the good of the hard working people of this great nation. Do not let them diminish us all by being inhuman and ask them to demand that jobs pay living wages and do not get exported for an extra buck to go to executive bonuses. These are the executives that have disowned McGregor. They now maximize short-term profit by exporting jobs to venues with cheaper labor, destroying protective laws and unions and millions of families in the process. All the Right’s horses and all the Right’s men can’t put these people together again.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
1 October 2011

Greed be Good

2011-10-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

In 1965, Alan Greenspan wrote:

“It is precisely the greed of the businessman, or more precisely, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer” (Madrick, 228).
This should really be the epitaph inscribed on the tombstone of the American economy. Far from ‘protecting’ consumers, the greed that has defined American business and especially Wall Street these last 40 years has decimated the economy, loaded businesses with debt, put millions of Americans out of work, and transferred huge chunks of American industry to foreign countries such as China. Therein lies the theme of Jeff Madrick’s crucial book, The Age of Greed, (Knopf: 2011). To read it, with its portraits of banksters and junk bond traders and acquisition specialists and CEOs of America’s largest corporations, is to learn of chicanery, conniving and contempt for average Americans on such a scale as to sometimes deceive the reader into thinking he is reading Dante’s Inferno. Such characters—some of the mightiest names in corporate and political America in the latter years of the 20th Century, names like Rubin and Weill and Reagan and Greenspan and Friedman and Milken and Boesky and Welch—do deserve a poet like Dante to fix them in an appropriate level of pain and torment. While Madrick is not that poet, he does a creditable enough job of this to sicken even the most cynical reader, for his is the tale of the outright looting and crippling of the American industrial might (along with its workers) that was once the envy of the world.

The book begins with the general proposition that while industry and transportation and communications and retailing were once the foundations of American wealth and prosperity, “by the 1990s and 2000s, financial companies provided the fastest path to fabulous wealth for individuals” (24). And where government was once seen as a needed supporter and regulator of such enterprises, Milton Friedman’s economic doctrines, put into saleable form by Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan, turned government into the enemy. As Friedman wrote, “The fact is that the Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government (mis)management rather than by the inherent instability of the private economy.” The answer to all problems, in this tortured view, lay not in government actions to help those who need it, but in reducing government and lowering taxes so as to (allegedly) make the poor better off, eliminate inequality and discrimination, and lead us all to the promised free-market land. As noted above, Alan Greenspan believed wholeheartedly in these and other theories (especially those espoused by his friend Ayn Rand), and Ronald Reagan became the shill for selling such pie-in-the-sky nonsense to the American public. As with his sales work for General Electric, Reagan marketed the kool-aid more successfully than anyone could have anticipated. In office in California as governor, he blamed welfare recipients for the state government’s financial problems: “Welfare is the greatest domestic problem facing the nation today and the reason for the high cost of government.” When he got to the national stage with inflation rampant, he hit government profligacy even harder. “We don’t have inflation because the people are living too well,” he said. “We have inflation because government is living too well” (169). All this was coupled with his mantra that getting back to the kind of “rugged individualism” that had made America (and himself) great required reducing taxes. And reduce he did. From a tax rate that was at 70% on the highest earners when he took office, he first signed the 1981 Kemp-Roth bill to reduce it to 50%, and then, in 1986, with the Tax Reform Act, reduced it even further to 28%. Meantime, the rate for the poorest Americans was raised from 11% to 15%, while earlier, Reagan had also raised the payroll tax (for Social Security) from 12.3% to 15.3%. This latter raise, it should be noted, coupled with the provision that only wages up to $107,000 would be taxed for SS, meant that “earners in the middle one-fifth of Americans would now pay nearly 10% of their income in payroll taxes, while those in the top 1% now paid about 1-1/2%” (170). And what Reagan never mentioned about his “rugged individualism” is that he was made wealthy by those rich men who cajoled him to run for office: his agent arranged for 20th Century Fox to buy Reagan’s ranch for $2 million (he had paid only $65,000 for it), giving him a tidy profit with which to buy another ranch that also doubled in price when he sold it.

But such tales treat only the enablers. It is when we get to the actual hucksters of this story that things get interesting (or nauseating, depending on your point of view.) The basic scheme went like this: find a company that is undervalued—often because it had managed its assets so well it had cash on hand—and acquire it, using debt to finance the takeover. Then make money—and I mean millions and billions—on all the steps involved in the takeover, including the debt service, the legal fees, and the rise (or fall) in the stock price. For in the age of greed that Madrick documents, the stock price was all. Anything that pushed the stock price of a company up was good. Anything that pushed it down was bad (unless you were one of those smart guys like hedge-fund ace George Soros who worked the “shorts”). And of course, the best way to get a company’s stock price to go up was to increase profits. And the best way to do that was not to innovate or develop better products, but to slash costs, i.e. fire workers. Here is how Madrick puts it:

American business was adopting a business strategy based on maximizing profits, large size, bargaining power, high levels of debt, and corporate acquisitions…Cutting costs boldly, especially labor costs, was a central part of the strategy. (187)
What began to happen in the 1980s and into the 1990s was that all companies, no matter how successful, became targets of the ruthless merger mania that replaced normal business improvements. Lawyers like Joe Flom and takeover artists like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens could spot an undervalued, or low-stock-price company (the process reminds one of wolves spotting a young, or lame deer in a herd) to take over, using borrowed money to finance it (90% of the purchase price). The borrowing then demanded that the new merged company cut costs in order to service the huge debt required for the merger—which in turn required firing workers. If a company did not want to be taken over, the only way to do so was to get its stock price to rise, and this, too, required the firing of workers. In either case, the workers took the hit. But the CEOs running the merged ventures, often sweethearted into selling by generous gifts of stock, “usually made a fortune.” As Madrick notes, in 1986, Macy CEO Ed Finkelstein arranged for a private buyout of his firm, for $4.5 billion, and became the “envy of fellow CEOs” (174). Like many other mergers, however, this one drained what was one of America’s most successful retail operations, and Macy’s went bankrupt in 1992. Madrick concludes:

The allegiance of business management thus shifted from the long-term health of the corporations, their workers, and the communities they served, to Wall St. bankers who could make them personally rich... (173)
In the process, of course, the Wall Street bankers and leveraged buyout firms (LBOs) like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts who arranged the buys and the financing took in obscene amounts of money. So did risk abitrageurs (who invest in prospective mergers and acquisitions, angling to buy before the stock price rises on the rumor of a merger) like Ivan Boesky. Earning $100 million in one year alone (1986 when he was Wall Street’s highest earner), Boesky required information to buy early, and got into the little habit of paying investment bankers for that information, i.e. on upcoming deals. Unfortunately for him, he got caught in his banner year because one of his informants (Dennis Levine of Drexel Burnham) was arrested and made a deal to name those he had tipped off. Boesky was one (the deal was to pay Levine 5% of his profits for early information on a takeover), and he too was subpoenaed in the fall of 1986. Boesky immediately agreed to finger others (agreeing to wear a wire at meetings), and nailed Martin Siegel, also with Drexel, who, in turn, kept the daisy chain of ratting out associates going by naming Robert Freeman, an arbitrageur at Goldman Sachs. Nice fellows. Boesky ended up serving three years in prison, but he fingered an even bigger fish, Michael Milken. Then the wealthiest and most ruthless Wall Streeter of all, Milken, who made his money in junk bonds (risky high-interest bonds to ‘rescue’ companies in trouble) was sentenced to 10 years in jail (reduced to 2 years for good behavior) for securities violations, plus $1.3 billion in fines and restitution. He’d made so much money, though, that he and his family still had billions, including enough to start a nice foundation for economic research, to commemorate his good name in perpetuity.

There are, of course, lots of other admirable characters in this tale, but one in particular deserves mention--Jack Welch, the revered CEO of General Electric. This is because Welch’s reign at GE typifies what greed did to a once-great American institution, the very one that Ronald Reagan shilled for in a more innocent age, the one that brought the Gipper to the attention of the big money boys. Welch made enormous profits for GE (in 2001, the year he left, GE earnings had grown by 80 times to more than $5 billion), and for himself, but he didn’t do it the “old fashioned way,” i.e. by developing new and better products. He did it by shifting the emphasis at GE from production to finance. Welch saw the value of this early:

“My gut told me that compared to the industrial operations I did know, the business (i.e. GE Capital) seemed an easy way to make money. You didn’t have to invest heavily in R&D, build factories, or bend metal…” (191)
To give an idea of how this works, Madrick points out that “in 1977, GE Capital…generated $67 million in revenue with only 7,000 employees, while appliances that year generated $100 million and required 47,000 workers” (191). Welch did the math. It didn’t take him long to sell GE’s traditional appliance business to Black & Decker, outraging most employees, though not many of them were left to protest: in his first two years, Welch laid off more than 70,000 workers, nearly 20% of his work force, and within five years, about 130,000 of GE’s 400,000 workers were gone. Fortune Magazine admiringly labeled him the “toughest boss in America.” And by the time he left the company in 2001, GE Capital Services had spread from North America to forty-eight countries, with assets of $370 billion, making GE the most highly valued company in America. The only problem was, with the lure of money and profits so great, GE Capital acquired a mortgage brokerage (Welch was no mean takeover artist himself) and got into subprime lending. In 2008, GE’s profits, mostly based on its financial dealings, sank like a stone, with its stock price dropping by 60%. Welch, the great prophet of American competition, now had to witness his company being bailed out by the Federal Deposit Insurance Company: since it owned a small federal bank, the FDIC guaranteed nearly $149 billion of GE’s debt. So after turning a U.S. industrial giant into a giant bank, the man Fortune Magazine named “manager of the century” also succeeded in turning it into a giant welfare case. Perhaps there’s a lesson here somewhere.

There’s more in this disturbing book—such as the fact that Wall Streeters not only attacked corporations in takeovers, they also attacked governments (George Soros’ hedge fund attacked the British pound, as well as Asian currency in 1999, causing crises in both places, and ultimately, cutbacks in government programs for the poor)—but the story is the same. During several decades of Wall Street financial predation, insider trading, and more financial chicanery than most of us can even dream of, the high-rolling banksters made off with trillions of dollars, and most others (including union pension funds) lost their shirts. Madrick quotes John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Funds, concerning the bust of the high-tech IPO bubble: “If the winners raked in some $2.275 Trillion, who lost all the money?...The losers, of course, were those who bought the stocks and who paid the intermediation fees…the great American public” (332). The same scenario was played out again and again, in derivatives trading, in the housing boom, in the mortgage-backed securities boom, in the false evaluations of stock analysts like Jack Grubman, in the predatory mergers and subprime shenanigans of Citibank CEO Sandy Weill, and on and on, all with an ethic perfectly expressed in an email, made public by the SEC, commenting on how ‘the biz’ was now run:

“Lure the people into the calm and then totally fuck ‘em” (334).

That’s essentially the story here. And the sad ending, which most of us haven’t really digested yet, is that the very vipers who cleverly and maliciously calculated each new heist and made off with all the money while destroying the economy, then got federal guarantees and loans that came to more than $12 trillion, that’s trillion, to “save the country.” And now lobby for “austerity” and “leaner government” and fewer “wasteful social programs” like social security and Medicare, and fewer regulations so that their delicate business minds can feel safe enough to invest again. And save us all again with their unfettered greed.

In which case, I’ll sure feel protected. Won’t you?

Lawrence DiStasi

Avatars and Immortality

2011-09-28T09:49:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has read or heard even a little history knows that the dream of immortality has existed among humans for a very long time. Most of these dreams (though not all, as the Christian fundamentalist notions of the “rapture,” and Islamic fundamentalist notions of a heaven full of virgins awaiting the martyrs who blow themselves and others up, prove) have been debunked in recent years, when even the Roman Catholic Church has pretty much abandoned its notion of an afterlife in fire for those who’ve been ‘bad’ (whether Catholics still believe in a blissful Heaven for those who’ve been ‘good’ remains unclear to me).
What’s astonishing is that this dream of living forever now exists in the most unlikely of places—among computer geeks and nerds who mostly profess atheism. It exists, that is, in two places: virtual reality, and the transformation of humans into cyborgs (though cyborgs don’t specifically promise immortality, they do promise to transform humans into machines, which is a kind of immortality—see Pagan Kennedy, “The Cyborg in Us All,” NY Times, 9.14.11). If you can create an avatar—a virtual computerized model—of yourself (as has been done for Orville Redenbacher, so that, though dead, he still appears in his popcorn commercials), you can in some sense exist forever. The title of the avatar game on the internet, “Second Life,” reveals this implicitly. So does the reaction of volunteers whom Jeremy Bailenson studied for a Stanford experiment purporting to create avatars that could be preserved forever. When the subjects found out that the science to create immortal avatars of themselves didn’t yet exist, many screamed their outrage. They had invested infinite hope in being among the first avatar-based immortals.

Before dismissing this as foolish dreamery, consider how far this movement has already gone. Right now, the video games that most kids engage in (my grandson has a Wii version of Star Wars in which he ‘becomes’ Lego-warrior avatars who destroy everything in sight) “consume more hours per day than movies and print media combined” (Jeremy Bailenson and Jim Blascovich, Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution, Morrow: 2011, p. 2) The key point about this, moreover, is that countless neuroscience experiments have proved that “the brain doesn’t much care if an experience is real or virtual.” Read that again. The brain doesn’t care whether an experience is “only virtual.” It reacts in much the same way as it does to “reality.”

Frankly, until I read Infinite Reality, all of this had pretty much passed me by. I had read about virtual-reality helmets such as the kind used to train pilots, but I had no idea that things had gone so far. I had no idea that millions of people sign up for the online site called “Second Life” (I tried; it seemed impossibly complex and stupid to me), and invest incredible amounts of time and emotional energy setting up an alternate personality (avatar) that can enter the website’s virtual world and interact in any way imaginable with other people’s avatars. Needless to say, most people equip their avatars with qualities they would like to have, or have wondered about having. Then they go looking for people (avatars) with whom to experiment in a wished-for interaction. The most common interaction, not surprisingly, seems to be sex with another avatar, or several others; but there’s also a lot of wheeling and dealing to gain wealth and prestige. Talk about “be all that you can be!”

Still, the really interesting stuff happens when you get into a virtual laboratory. Whereas “Second Life” takes place on a flat computer screen, virtual reality really comes into its own when you don a headset that can simulate real scenes in 3D fidelity so real that when people approach a simulated pit in front them, they invariably recoil (even though they’re “really” walking on a level floor). While virtual reality of this kind is expensive today, there can be little question that it soon will have become commonplace. Rather than spending tons of money traveling to China, say, one will be able to go there “virtually,” without having to endure the travails of travel, including bothersome other people. What makes this eerie is that video games are already working with this kind of VR, and creating avatars. In games like Pong, Wii, Move, and Kinect the game computer can already “track” a user’s physical movements and then “render” a world incorporating those movements into a virtual tennis scene that is authentic in all necessary details. So,

In a repetitive cycle, the user moves, the tracker detects that movement, and the rendering engine produces a digital representation of the world to reflect that movement…when a Wii tennis player swings her hand, the track wand detects the movement and the rendering engine draws a tennis swing. (p. 44)
As Bailenson notes, “in a state of the art system, this process (of tracking and rendering the appropriate scene from the point of view of the subject) repeats itself approximately 100 times a second.” Everything in the virtual scene appears smooth and natural, including, in the game “Grand Theft Auto,” an episode where players can “employ a prostitute and then kill her to get their money back.” And remember, the brain reacts to all this in the same way it does when it is “really” happening.

The implications to a psychologist like Bailenson are profound. Short people, for example, who adopt a tall avatar for themselves, show definite improvements in their self-image, even after they’ve left the avatar behind. They also show improvements in competition: in real games held afterwards, the person whose avatar was taller became a more successful negotiator. Those who fashion a trim, beautiful avatar, show the same rise in self-esteem. Bailenson also notes the importance of people’s attributions of “mind” or reality to inanimate objects like computers, and this includes avatars. In one experiment, subjects were shown a real person named Sally, and then her avatar disfigured with a birthmark (neurophysiological studies show that interacting with a “stigmatized other,” even someone with a birthmark, causes a threat response). After four or five minutes interacting with Sally’s disfigured avatar, subjects displayed the heart-rate response indicating threat—even though they knew the real Sally had no birthmark. And the games sold to consumers keep getting more sophisticated in this regard. In the Sony PlayStation game, THUG 2 (over 1 million sold in U.S.) players can upload their photos onto the face of a character, and then have their “clones” perform amazing feats of skateboarding, etc. They can also watch them performing actions not under their control. This brings up the question of the effect of watching one’s “doppelganger” (a character with one’s appearance) do something in virtual reality. It appears to be profound: the more similar a virtual character is to the person observing, the more likely the observer is to mimic that character. This can be positive: watching a healthy person who seems similar can lead a person to adopt healthy behavior. But other possibilities are legion. Baileson mentions the commercial ones:

…if a participant sees his avatar wearing a certain brand of clothing, he is more likely to recall and prefer that brand. In other words, if one observes his avatar as a product endorser (the ultimate form of targeted advertising), he is more likely to embrace the product. (119)
In short, we prefer what appears like us. Experiments showed that even subjects who knew their faces had been placed in a commercial, still expressed preference for the brand after the study ended. Can anyone imagine most corporations aren’t already planning for what could be a bonanza in this type of narcissistic advertising?

More bizarre possibilities for avatars, according to Bailenson and Blascovich, seem endless. In the brave new world to come, “wearing an avatar will be like wearing contact lenses.” And these avatars will be capable of not only ‘seeing’ virtual objects and ‘feeling’ them (using ‘haptic’ devices), but of appearing to walk among us. More ominously, imposters can “perfectly re-create and control other people’s avatars” as has already happened with poor old Orville Redenbacher. Tracking devices—which can see and record every physical movement you make—make this not only possible, but inevitable. Everyone, with all physical essentials, will be archived.

All of this makes the idea of “the real world” rather problematic. Of course, neuroscience has already told us that the ‘world’ we see and believe in is really a model constructed by our brains, but still, this takes things several steps beyond that. For if, in virtual reality, “anybody can interact with anybody else in the world, positively or negatively,” then what does it mean to talk about “real” experience? If “everything everybody does will be archived,” what does privacy mean?

At the least, one can say this: a brave new world is already upon us (think of all those kids with video games; think of how much time you already spend staring at your computer screen), and you can bet that those with an eye to profiting from it are already busy, busy, busy. One can also say, take a walk in the real outdoors with real dirt, grass, trees, worms, bugs, and the sweet smell of horseshit; it may soon be only a distant memory.

Lawrence DiStasi

Jobs

2011-09-28T09:19:00.000-07:00

Just a little historical perspective on jobs. Like many things in recent history jobs, as we know them, didn’t always exist. Tribal societies didn’t have jobs where people went to work for a certain length of time and received an agreed upon compensation. Often they were tribal societies that didn’t have money or clocks. Still essential work was done and usually no one starved or everyone starved. The Inca empire before 1533 was an example of an advanced civilization without unemployment, poverty and almost no crime. Each person had their roll in a thoughtfully structured society. All that changed with the Spanish conquest.
Much of the work done in feudalistic, societies was performed by slaves, or virtual slaves such as serfs, indentured servants and children. It is only in the last hundred years or so that the present concept of workers rights has been viewed as something people are entitled to; although that concept is under attack by the far right.

As important as jobs are in a capitalist society, not everyone needs to work and not all work is meaningful or necessary. Children and students don’t need to work, stay at home parents don’t have to work if they have enough income. Those who are mentally or physically ill might not work. Those who are rich might not choose to work and the same is true of retired people. If we are really worried about jobs raising the retirement age would make the jobless rate much worse.

Most social problems have solutions and it is just a matter of determining the best course of action. The jobs problem is certainly solvable but the political debate rages on while little real headway is made on this issue that will likely determine who we elect as President and which party we think can bring down the unemployment rate.

The Republican positions on lowering the unemployment rate are certainly narrower in scope than the Democratic solutions. Lower taxes on the rich and corporations and less regulation on business is simply, easy to remember and doesn’t work. When I say it doesn’t work I’m speaking from a utilitarian perspective in that it doesn’t even come close to providing the greatest good for the greatest number of people. We have clear evidence that it doesn’t work because we have tried those solutions before and they failed. What they are advocating is nothing more than the Laissez Faire capitalism of the 1800’s, or the neo-feudalism of the Victorian Age that produced vast economic inequality. It may provide extra wealth for those who are already rich and it may allow corporations to do want they want to do instead of what they should do, but there is no consistent data I know of that by following that simple plan a lot of jobs would be created. No matter how many times they say Ronald Reagan and the magic of the free market that isn’t going to change. For the voter who doesn’t want to think too hard about complex solutions, such as good jobs for more people, it gives them a belief system that is absolutist in nature to the point where deviation and compromise are not an option. Full employment isn’t even a Republican objective; at least I’ve never heard them say it was.
On the other hand Democrats have some core values about jobs. They believe in the right to belong to a union, to have a retirement program, to have a minimum wage, to have sick leave and paid vacations, safe working conditions and to have affordable health care. Beyond that most Democrats believe that government can do things to create jobs and to prevent jobs from being outsourced. Other countries like China have had an active role in developing industries that manufacture goods and expand clean energy. The criticism of this is that government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in the business world. What if we had sat back and allowed General Motors to fail? Sometimes American businesses need government help to succeed and need to partner with government on research and development. We need to give incentives to businesses that hire Americans and penalize those companies that outsource American jobs. President Obama has a lot of practical measures in the American Jobs Act that should work if he can get it passed.

Roughly one out of thirteen Americans has a government job but at this point in time about 16% of the work force would like a full time job. Hiring people to repair infrastructure as outlined in the jobs bill is a good start. One of the really big problems with jobs is too many people are salaried employees. They are working seventy hours a week and being paid for only forty hours. If a law were passed that required that all employers must pay employees for all hours worked pay time and a half would be for hours over forty that would reduce unemployment significantly. In fact, Republicans often advocate cutting employees to save money and that results in paying unemployment benefits to laid off workers while the remaining workers have to be paid overtime to get the work done. Another big part of the jobs problem is that corporations play one state off against another by trying to lure companies away from other states by lower taxes, subsidies and right to work laws. States would be far better off financially if they would simply adopt uniform rules that would not allow corporations to pick and choose. We should pass buy- American incentives so that American manufactured goods can be competitive with foreign made goods. That may not be free trade but other countries protect their economies and so should we.

Finally, the Republican argument that government cannot be the solution to the jobs problem appears to be false when you go on the internet and look at the unemployment rate of countries around the world on Wikipedia. it shows that the United States has a 9.3% unemployment rate. Turkmenistan 70%, Yemen 35% and Honduras 27.8% shows that countries with really bad government and no social safety net to speak of have few jobs for their people. On the other hand Monaco 0.0%, Belarus 0.7%, Singapore 1.9%, Malasia 3.2% and China 4.1% shows that governments that actively work to provide opportunity for all can come close to full employment. Even countries that don’t have a high standard of living such as Cuba 1.6% and Vietnam 2.9% can at least prevent severe poverty and homelessness.

Dave Silva

Reliving History

2011-09-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

As I look at the papers and postings
It’s hard to see where I’m at
Because I read all the boastings
About solutions to fix this and that
And candidates who surely know better
Claim their elixirs will cure
Our ills right down to the letter
If we only agree to endure
The poisons about to be poured
And that will just thrill us
Unless it will kill us
As we wade through the welter of lies
Only history enlightens our lives

I have been reading extensively about the 20s and 30s to examine the cycle of history at home and abroad (Italy) to see what lessons might be learned. The sources were partly biographical, but are mostly records of the times wrapped around personalities such as FDR and folks like Hoover and even (Saint) Padre Pio. The American biographies provided a view of our economics, politics and sociology and the Padre Pio book gave insight to Italy during the period. The developments at home and abroad were remarkably similar, although the outcomes were less so and details varied from point to point.

In America, the sociology was framed by an almost Calvinistic belief that afflictions besetting individuals, families and communities were visited upon them through their sins and the sins of their forebears. Poverty was the natural outcome of this pre-condition and wealth was seen, not only as a blessing from God, but a sign of earthly holiness, or Grace on earth. Italian experience differed in that they had more recently lived through times where birth determined worth, but not in the Calvinist model. The lord of the manor had power over peons and as bad as education was in many rural American areas, it was better than the Italian model. Both sides of the Atlantic suffered from poor nutrition. In fact, it was a major cause of rejection for the military draft as things heated up for the US entry into WW II. A common element was the role of religion in everyday life, especially for the poor. In Italy there was an attachment to mysticism, especially through the lives of Roman Catholic saints. In the US, there was a virulent fundamentalism that rivaled any in history. The fundamentalist Ku Klux Klan was active in blaming minorities for the ills of our nation. Opportunistic preachers including Gerald L.K. Smith, Gerald Winrod and Fr. Coughlin whipped up sentiment against the left and supported the right and the “New America” of Colonel Lindbergh (hero and Nazi supporter). In Italy, socialists and even communists whipped up sentiments for fairness and even retribution against landowners. There, Benito Mussolini negotiated with the pope and collected religious support for his plans. Negotiations in 1929 resulted in the Lateran Treaty and the Concordat that returned 194 acres to the Church for the Vatican and split responsibilities for marriage and education between Church and State. Uneducated people tried to explain and interpret their lives in ways that made sense to them. It was a perfect storm that engulfed much of the planet. In Europe overall, WW I reparations sapped economic growth and colonialism was uttering its Last Hurrah so that survival by exploitation of colonies was diminishing and unable to keep economies viable. The dividing line between haves and have-nots sharpened. Symbolism held enormous power over largely illiterate populations; aided by religiosity and a history of compliance.

Wars then, just as now, had sapped the strength of nations and visited hunger and poverty on masses of people. Natural calamities such as the Dust Bowl in the US deepened misery and pain. Revolution in Europe brought fear and reaction from the far right in Italy. In the US, President Hoover, earlier an appointed hero of the great flood of 1927, expressed that government had no role in changing the dynamics of economics and he instituted a woefully inadequate program of helping starving Americans by encouraging his wealthy friends to give to the Community Chest in 1930-31. The program was a failure because his friends largely ignored his pleas and the reality of hunger brought shame to proud Americans. It succeeded in the sense that it placated the wealthy who felt vindicated that the poor deserved their lot in life and they deserved their wealth. Fundamentalist preachers, focused on alcohol, dancing and revivals, but supported harsh economic remedies. Today, they largely attack abortion and homosexuality, but the attachment by fundamentalists to the political right wing and drastic economics remains. In Italy, Padre Pio, despite being in the Capuchin monastery of San Giovanni Rotondo in an obscure corner of southern Italy, was known throughout the continent because of his miracles and his five stigmata that matched those of Jesus. Both socialists and fascists pursued the simple priest, but fascists won out and he was often seen with fascist operatives and members of parliament as he ministered to thousands of pilgrims. The nexus of the Church and fascism in Italy was coupled with a large dose of Anti-Semitism, especially in Germany, Italy, and Spain. Here in the US it was linked with both fundamentalists and Catholics like Fr. Coughlin who claimed that the abominable treatment of Jews by Germany was an internal matter for Germans; none of our concern and surely nothing to go to war for. In Italy, Il Duce still pursued “corporatism” as he defined fascism. This allowed him to denounce and limit unions and spur his expansionist plans. He denied Jews basic rights and invaded North Africa and sent military to Franco in Spain while the Church was focused on the atheistic Red Menace. Paradoxically, Il Duce asked the pope (Pius XI) to excommunicate Hitler who, though born Catholic, was pagan. Mussolini feared Hitler would annex the South Tyrol. Wars and infrastructure projects put Italians to work and gave reason to destroy labor unions as a matter of security just as unions organized to fight for workers. Conservatives equated unions to socialism and communism despite lacking evidence. This served corporatism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. Churches in Italy and the United States simply stood by or supported owners and corporations. Low wages prevailed, but Italians worked.

At home the theme was isolationism fostered by the far right who praised both Hitler and Mussolini as they demanded that we shun pleas from England, Spain and France for support. Unions were attacked, often using state or federal police and military resources to break up demonstrations, shoot demonstrators; reduce demand for wages and stall unrest that might take root here. The downward pressure on wages escalated as unions were attacked. One corporate CEO was quoted as saying “A man should be able to feed his family for 50 cents per day.” Those asking for higher wages were seen as immoral by owners and executives. Corporate profits were high and wages were low (sound familiar?) with the exception of Henry Ford who stated that his workers had to be paid well to afford to buy his cars. The Supreme Court declared child labor laws unconstitutional to further erode wages, saying, in effect, that children who could not otherwise execute contracts had a right to independently contract their labor. Despite brutal suppression of labor, Americans had little love for communism and they bore their burdens with grim resolve. Grocers like my Dad gave food to those without and put charges on records that were kept but never paid. Years later, when I found the records and confronted my father about them, he simply said: “They had to eat.”
Here in 2011, technology has changed, but little else. We see the far right in the US demanding shrinkage of government size and spending and expansion of government to control abortion and our southern border. Instead of blaming blacks and Jews for our troubles, as we did in the 20s and 30s we now focus on Mexican and Central Americans causing job shortages, although every study demonstrates that to be false. Corporations are enjoying record profits and lowering wages yet again as they shed jobs and demand more from the workers they retain. Preachers are preaching hate in more subtle tones, as they join the chorus to get on your knees instead of your feet. The numbers of abortions has dropped in recent years, but those cries still out-shout the cries of the poor. The tactics of conservatives have become more strident and they protect the upper class by demanding pledges of tax cuts in the face of declining government revenues and services.

There are some real outcomes of smaller government that some are unwilling to agree cause serious problems. As a single example, Texas leads the nation in minimum wage workers and has cut the training, equipping and staffing of Volunteer fire departments by 75%. At least 1600 homes have been destroyed by wildfires there. Hmm. In Wisconsin, conservatives unilaterally stripped unions of their rights to bargain for wages or working conditions while providing a grant to selected corporations that totaled more than the dollars taken from teachers and first responders. The Koch brothers recently gathered up conservative corporation executives and led a million dollar meeting where conservative donors had to pledge a minimum of $ 1 Million for their GOP friends in the coming election. Buddy, can you spare a $ million? Plutocrats and polluters won’t disappear overnight. We have seen presidential candidate Perry conduct a revival like prayer service to burnish his fundamentalist bona fides. We have seen candidate Bachmann deftly resign from her fundamentalist church that openly calls the pope “the Antichrist” just days before declaring her candidacy. Bachmann also signed a pledge by social conservatives in Iowa stating “A Black child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African American President.” The pledge shows not only blatant prejudice, but shows ignorance of American slavery that deliberately broke up and sold parts of families and where slave owners frequently bred slaves personally by having sex with them that could, in no way, be considered consensual. People in Italy drifted from organized religion and have developed a less trusting and more distant attitude toward the Church, unlike fundamentalists here. This joining of Church and State in the US may have nasty consequences for public education, public medicine and additional areas too numerous to list. More recently, she has stated that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. This lie will cause confusion among the uninformed and may cause pain, disease and suffering among those who refuse the vaccine based on her comments.

This is where we must begin to stop the revision of history that paints the pain, depravation and degradation of our people as a time of glory. The excesses of the rich in defining the world as theirs to control was dominant in the 20s and 30s. Limiting the benevolence of government and enhancing its power for sanction is moving us in exactly the wrong direction. A man or woman out of work or underpaid becomes a set of problems and a study in agony and bad behavior. It is not a trial where they are strengthened by fire, but one where they are burned and scarred. There is a role for government and the idea that we should limit the benevolent side of the government is a sick excuse to further tilt the nation to plutocracy instead of democracy. We may go back to solutions of violence in the streets and probably will, but that only encourages bastards with money to use the force they buy to restore PAX Dollarama. Mussolini used military entertainment and civil projects. Hitler used war. Hoover used the Community Chest. Conservatives use religion, so what will Boehner and Cantor use? Which way will we go? Jobs provide dignity but more than dignity. They provide a haven where families dwell and a nation thrives. Poverty provides misery and strife and the US poverty level has just risen to 15.1%.

The violence will be televised this time, unlike the 20s and 30s. Be careful out there.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
11 September 2011

The Spirit of Capitalism

2011-09-11T16:57:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Max Weber’s seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism lately and it illuminates a great deal about the spirit of our times—a spirit that has been termed The Age of Greed by Jeff Madrick in his recent book of that name. And while what Madrick describes is really the transformation in the last 40 years of America from an industrialized society to a financialized one, it doesn’t address the origins that interest me here. Weber was interested in this too. His question really was not only ‘why do people work to begin with’ (primary cultures had no concept called “work” at all and only exerted themselves periodically in war or in short-term hunting and gathering), but more relevant to his time, ‘why do people in modern society identify themselves as laborers?’ How was it possible for western culture to transform itself from a traditional culture where labor hardly existed except as part of a manorial household, to post-1600s capitalist society where free laborers are yoked to paying jobs in capitalistic enterprises? More specifically, how could a state of mind that Weber finds best illustrated in Ben Franklin (a penny saved is a penny earned; time is money; credit is money—i.e. it is a duty to increase one’s capital) come to be adopted by whole societies when, in the Middle Ages and before, that state of mind would “have been proscribed as the lowest sort of avarice?” As sinful greed? To illustrate how remarkable this is, Weber compares traditional laborers with modern laborers. A farm owner, for example, who pays his workers at a piece-rate (like modern farm workers paid at so much per bushel), thinks to increase production by increasing rates. This works with modern workers, but when applied to traditional laborers, the increased rate backfires. The traditional worker, that is, not only does not increase his work rate, he decreases it—he works slower so as to still earn the same daily amount. As Weber summarizes it, “the opportunity of earning more was less attractive than that of working less.” Thus the attitude of traditionalism:

A man does not “by nature” wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose. (60)
Weber then devotes his entire book to explaining how Protestantism, especially the Calvinist branch of the Reformation, changed this traditionalist attitude towards work. While a “surplus population which it can hire cheaply” is necessary for capitalism to develop and thrive, so, he says, is a “developed sense of responsibility.” That is, for capitalism to work, “labour must…be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling.” Far from being natural, or even the product of high or low wages, this attitude “can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education” (62). And the educating body was, originally at least, Protestantism. It is important to note that this education in work did not, at least at first, involve an education in greed, much less enjoyment. To the contrary, Weber makes clear that the essential ingredient, in the beginning, involved a kind of asceticism—not the asceticism of the monastery, but an asceticism in the world. To make labor a calling, that is, meant making labor an obligation in the service of God, of salvation. One was schooled in the idea that hard and constant work was an end in itself, the way of salvation for the average person, and that saving the money one earned was part of that obligation. In order to save, of course, one had to be frugal, buying only what was absolutely necessary. The asceticism that had been the mark of the otherworldly Catholic monastery, that is, was brought into the world. So one worked, one saved (“a penny saved is a penny earned”) and one eventually prospered. It is a commonplace that in the American colonies during the Puritan period (Boston, etc.), these essential elements were merged in such a way that prospering in business became synonymous with salvation—or rather, prospering became a sign of salvation. This is because though election (salvation) or damnation was pre-determined by God, the actual judgment was uncertain, and this uncertainty was almost intolerable. One’s prosperity thus became a sign, a way for the uncertainty to be resolved. The opposite was also true: poverty became a sign of damnation, making the poor doubly damned—both in this world and the next. The sad truth is that many Americans still maintain these essential attitudes.

Work as a calling then, work as a duty, and success in work as a sign of salvation are the essential elements of the Protestant ethic. They are also the essential elements of the spirit of capitalism. As Weber puts it,

the expansion of modern capitalism is not in the first instance a question of the origin of the capital sums which were available…but, above all, of the development of the spirit of capitalism (68).
This is not to say that Protestantism ignored the dangers of wealth. Weber cites the writings of Richard Baxter as illustrative. And there, the key to this danger involved idleness and the temptations of the flesh it exposed one to. As Weber interprets Baxter, “Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins….Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, more sleep than is necessary for health..is worthy of absolute moral condemnation” (157). A person was thus led to work constantly, to save what he earned, never to enjoy the fruits of his labor, but rather invest those savings as an entrepreneur in new opportunities for more work (and wealth). So while the ethic frowned on wealth and the luxuries it fostered, it at the same time had the “psychological effect of freeing the acquisition of goods from the inhibitions of the traditionalist ethic. It broke the bonds of the impulse of acquisition in that it not only legalized it, but looked upon it as directly willed by God” (171).

Weber ends his work with the ironic contradiction involved in this religiously inspired ethic. He quotes John Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism, as follows:

“I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches….So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away.” (175)
The protestant entrepreneur, in this way, not only won the “feeling of God’s grace” for doing his duty in getting rich, but also a supply of “sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen, who clung to their work as to a life purpose willed by God.” This ethic comforted the capitalist entrepreneur as well that the “unequal distribution of the goods of this world was a special dispensation of Divine Providence.” For had not Calvin himself said that ‘only when people, i.e. the mass of laborers and craftsmen, were poor did they remain obedient to God?’ (177). He had. So low wages, themselves, had been rationalized and justified by the divine.

The Protestant ethic, in sum, according to Weber, not only sanctified labor as a calling enabling a worker to be certain of his election, it also legalized, for the capitalist, the “exploitation of this specific willingness to work.” A Daily Double if there ever was one.

It takes little to see how these attitudes and rationalizations are still in use today. America sanctifies capitalism as literally the manifestation of both God’s will and the natural order of things. American media also lionizes those entrepreneurs who, at least according to their own myth, raise themselves by their own bootstraps to become rich—to become “elect” in modern society’s terms. Finally, American capitalism rationalizes the unequal distribution of wealth and goods in this world as simply the workings of natural or divine laws with which mere humans cannot quarrel.

To Max Weber’s credit, he ends his study with a scathing reminder that though this ethic began in the cloak of saintliness, its apotheosis in industrial capitalism became “an iron cage.” Had he known about capitalism’s most recent metamorphosis into an ongoing financial heist creating ever more inequality, his critique would have been far more savage.

Lawrence DiStasi

Riverside's Mine' Okubo

2011-08-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

Mine´ Okubo, internationally acclaimed artist, illustrator, and author, was born in Riverside, California, in a rented house on Eleventh and Kansas Streets, on June 27, 1912. The site of her birth is now part of Bobby Bonds Park, but while Mine´ was growing up, the house was surrounded on three sides by citrus groves. She loved playing in the water of the groves’ irrigation ditches, found pollywogs there, and sometimes brought them home in a pail, just to watch them swim. Hers was a world of fragrance and color, in a city founded by idealists and dreamers. Like many other residents, her parents crossed an ocean to build a new life.

She was the fourth child in a family that would number seven. Her father, a scholar of Japanese history and philosophy, named her after the Japanese creation goddess Mine, [pronounced mee-neh], a great honor. However, most people in her hometown, unfamiliar with the creation goddess, called her “Minnie.”

Mine´ Okubo attended Riverside schools: Longfellow Elementary and Poly High. Her parents offered to send her to Casa Blanca’s Japanese language school, too, but she declined, saying, “I don’t need to learn Japanese! I’m an American!”

She learned Japanese culture at home, anyway. Mama taught her calligraphy, and Father endowed her with the Japanese philosophy of the Four Noble Truths, a guide to ethics.

In 1931, when Mine´ enrolled in college, she rode her bicycle past citrus groves and smudge pots, down the arroyo, then back up the hill, to the not-yet-completed Riverside Junior College, where she studied with the school’s first generation of teachers.

Richard M. Allman, Professor of Art, quickly recognized Miss Okubo’s potential. She had talent and had learned discipline from her artist mother, who assigned her, early on, to paint a different cat every day, making sure to capture the cat’s personality, as well as its shape and color.

Dr. Allman encouraged the shy, quiet girl to illustrate for the school’s newspaper and become art editor of her class of 1933 yearbook. He said she should also pursue advanced study, preferably at the University of California at Berkeley. Mine´ didn’t know where Berkeley was, and didn’t think she or her family could afford it. Dr. Allman recommended her, anyway, Berkeley accepted her, awarded her a scholarship, and,with her part-time jobs, she could afford to study among some of America’s finest art teachers. John Haley, founder of the Berkeley School of Art, became her friend for life.

Mine´ distinguished herself at Berkeley, but missed Riverside, especially Mama. When Mine´ felt lonely, she pictured Riverside as she remembered it, then painted what she loved most – a serene image of Mama, seated in front of her neighborhood church, Bible in her lap, a cat at her side. That painting, “Mama with Cat, featured in exhibitions, books and magazines, now rests in a place of honor at Oakland Museum.

Graduating from Berkeley in 1937 with a Master’s degree in both Art and Anthropology, Mine´ won their prestigious Bertha Taussig Traveling Art Fellowship, to study art in Europe. The frugal Miss Okubo chose to take a freighter across the Atlantic, rather than travel via passenger ship, saying there weren’t many passengers on board the freighter, but plenty of grain!

She bought a used bicycle as soon as she got to France, rode it all over Paris, and parked by the Louvre, where she could study original art by The Great Masters.

In France, she learned new art perspectives in social realism, and she came to know those helpful guides to pronunciation, French accent marks. She quickly appropriated one for her own name, and, from then on, signed her work with an accent mark.

As she traveled throughout Europe, she often packed lunch and art supplies into her bicycle’s big basket, pedaled to a place that interested her, and stopped to internalize what she saw. Then, she created her own image of the place’s meaning, its artistic truth. She traveled in over a dozen different European countries while on fellowship.

By September, 1939, however, war was coming to Europe. Friends urged her to go home, where it was safer, but she continued to work, until the day she received a telegram from Riverside, saying Mama was very sick. Mine´ should come home right away.

She had little money with her in Switzerland, her belongings were back in France, and the Swiss-French border was already sealed. Leaving seemed almost impossible, but her Swiss friends loaned her money to travel, and, somehow, she got back to France and worked her way aboard the last American passenger ship leaving Bordeaux, France. Along with terrified refugees hurrying to leave Europe before bombs started falling, Mine´ headed home, crossing an Atlantic full of unseen dangers. World War II in Europe was declared while they were still at sea.

Mine´ made it back to Riverside in time to see her mother alive, in time to share with her and give thanks, but Mama died in 1940. Her remains lie in Riverside’s Olive Wood Cemetery, beneath stone calligraphy designed and executed by family friend Tyrus Wong, the Chinese fine artist who illustrated the forest in the Disney film, Bambi.

After mourning her mother, Mine looked for work. In response to the Depression, America had implemented the WPA, a series of Federal employment programs. They hired artists. Mine returned to the Bay Area, where people knew her work. The WPA was happy to hire a person of her professional stature, and assigned her to create murals for luxury liners, frescoes for military bases Treasure Island and Fort Ord, and to work in conjunction with the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, in San Francisco.

Glad to be earning money as an artist on important projects, Mine´ was also pleased to be sharing an apartment with her younger brother, Toku, now a Berkeley student. It was good to be with family again.

But on December seventh, 1941, Japan launched a surprise bomb attack on Pearl Harbor. Many Americans, stunned, no longer trusted anybody of Japanese heritage, even those formerly known personally as good neighbors. War changed everything.

People were edgy. Violence against Asians made headlines. A series of Presidential decrees ordered people of Japanese heritage to register, then to settle their affairs, prepare for mandatory evacuation from their homes. They must dispose of all belongings, pack as if going to camp, and bring only what each could carry. Nobody knew how long they would be away.

Mine´ and her brother were given three days’ notice to report. At their Berkeley assembly center, they were assigned collective family number 13660, and were never again referred to by officialdom by their given names. Under armed guard, with other evacuees, they boarded a bus and were driven over a bridge to San Bruno’s former race track, Tanforan, now an assembly center, where they lived for six months, in a horse stall.

Cameras were forbidden to internees, but Miss Okubo, knowing Americans wouldn’t believe what was happening unless they saw it for themselves, determined to document every day she spent behind barbed wire. Carrying her sketch pad throughout the camp, she carefully recorded all she saw and experienced.

After six months at Tanforan, she was shipped to Topaz, an internment camp in the high, alkaline desert of central Utah. Behind another set of barbed wire, she meticulously committed to paper all aspects of internment. She also taught art to interned children and illustrated covers for the three issues of Trek, the newsmagazine produced by and for the camp’s internees.

From her first week in internment to her last, she kept up extensive correspondence with friends outside. She even entered a Berkeley art contest by mail. She won! That brought her to the attention of editors of Fortune Magazine, in New York City, who were planning a special April 1944 issue, featuring Japanese culture. They offered Miss Okubo a job, illustrating their special edition. They asked her to please come to New York City within three days.

To leave Topaz, she had to undergo extensive security and loyalty checks. When finally cleared and en route to New York City, she reflected on her years of incarceration and regimentation, and wondered how she’d be able to adjust to open society again.
Fortune Magazine’s editors welcomed her, helped find an apartment, and put her right to work. When they saw her camp drawings, they were so impressed they dedicated a full-blown illustrated article on internment camps, the first published in a national magazine.

After the special issue came out, the most trusted man in news, Walter Cronkite, gave his entire nationally-televised CBS program to his interview with Miss Okubo. The shy girl from Riverside had become a national phenomenon.

Urged to publish her camp drawings as a book, Mine´ added short captions and called the book Citizen 13660. Columbia University Press published it in 1946, to great reviews, after which Mine´ toured the country, telling her story, exhibiting her art, making a special stop to see friends at Riverside Public Library.

She taught art at U C Berkeley for two years, then returned to New York to devote full time to her own art. Her commercial illustrations appeared in major magazines, newspapers and scientific books, and her fine art was exhibited from Boston to Tokyo.

She hosted memorable salons in her third-floor Greenwich Village apartment. Artists and intellectuals from Harlem to Stuttgart flocked there, to discuss the latest artworks.

In 1981, she testified on behalf of internees at New York City’s Congressional hearings of The U. S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, presenting commissioners a copy of Citizen 13660.

Miss Okubo received many honors for her work and her commitment. In 1973, Oakland Museum hosted a major retrospective of her work; in 1974, Riverside Community College named her Alumna of the Year; in 1987, The California State Department of Education featured her as one of twelve California women pioneers in The History of California (1800 to Present), on their large classroom poster, California Women: Courage, Compassion, Conviction, and in An Activities Guide for Kindergarten Through Grade 12; in 1991, she received Washington, D. C.s National Museum for Women in the Arts’ Women’s Caucus for Art Honor Award; in 1993, Japan featured her in their 2006 National High School yearbook, used in all Japanese schools; and in the same year, Riverside Community College paid her tribute by renaming a street on campus after her and featuring the original play, Mine’: A Name for Herself, at their Landis Performing Arts Center. The Smithsonian Institution later selected that play for its 2007 Day of Remembrance, and sponsored its performance in Washington, D. C.

Mine´ Okubo dedicated her life to art. Using Great Masters’ principles, she portrayed truth and beauty with integrity, and she did it with such simplicity that a child of seven could appreciate and understand her renderings. Betty La Duke, Professor of Art at University of Southern Oregon, describes her later paintings as “serene, Buddha-like.”

When Miss Okubo died on February 1, 2001, obituaries appeared in newspapers from New York to New Zealand. Memorials were held in New York City, Oakland, and Riverside. She left a legacy of courage, discipline, and love.
Her work continues to enlighten and to challenge. Her artwork hangs in major galleries and is treasured by collectors worldwide; her book, Citizen 13660, continues to be studied in classrooms across America and Canada. Recently, The Hague, in Holland, selected it as their choice for their summer discussion series.

Recognizing the lasting value of art over the ages, Mine´ Okubo bequeathed major pieces of her art and personal belongings to her first alma mater, Riverside Community College. Students and the public will have access to selections of the Okubo Collection at the College’s new Museum of Social Justice, scheduled to open June 27, 2012, the hundredth anniversary of Miss Okubo’s birth.

Mary H. Curtin

Decision fatigue, Anyone

2011-08-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

Among the several enlightening articles around last weekend, one stood out for me: John Tierney’s 8/17 NY Times piece on Decision Fatigue. It’s something everyone feels, but few of us understand that it’s a real syndrome, with roots in brain chemistry. That means that it’s not just some anecdotal phenomenon of people who complain, after shopping till dropping, that they’re exhausted—although that’s probably the most common experience for most of us. It’s far more general than that, and, apparently, far more universal (I always thought it was just me who hated shopping at whatever time of the year.) What this means is that the brain actually gets depleted of energy when it has to make lots of decisions—whether or not to eat another donut; whether or not to go online for a few more minutes; whether or not, as a judge, to grant parole to an inmate before you.

According to Tierney, the latter situation was a key one examined recently. In a report this year, two researchers looked into the decisions judges make, in an effort to account for why they rendered different judgments for defendants with identical records. After looking at the usual suspects (racism, other biases), they started to zero in on the time of day the judges made their decisions, and found that judges who made their rulings early in the day were far more likely to grant parole than those who saw a defendant late in the day. Looking even more closely, they found that if you were unlucky enough to appear before a judge just before the noon break, or just before closing time, you would likely have your parole plea rejected; if you saw the judge at the beginning of the day, or right after lunch, you were more likely to get your parole granted. The cause: decision fatigue. As the researchers noted, “the mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever their individual merits, wore them down.”

What this and other experiments have demonstrated is that each of us possesses “a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control.” And self-control requires that old bugaboo “will power”—a form of mental energy that can, and often is, exhausted. If you’ve spent your day resisting desire—whether it’s a yen for a cigarette, a candy bar, or a trip onto the internet—you’re less capable of resisting other temptations. Nor is this just a curious finding. What researchers argue is that this kind of decision fatigue is “a major—and hitherto ignored—factor in trapping people in poverty.” People who are poor, that is, constantly have to make that hardest of decisions, the trade-off (can I afford this? can I afford that? Should I pay the gas bill or buy good food?), and such decisions sap their energies for other efforts like school, work or improving their job prospects. This is confirmed by images that have long been used to condemn the poor for their failure of effort: welfare mothers buying junk food, or indulging in snacks while shopping. Far from being a condemnation of “weak character,” however, such activities often indicate decision fatigue, which the poor experience more than the rich because of the increased number of trade-offs their lives require, and hence the decreased willpower left them to resist impulse buying.

The big surprise in this research, though, comes with the brain studies. Everyone knows that the brain is a great consumer of sugar, or glucose, for energy. But what no one had expected was the specific connection between glucose supply and willpower. In a series of experiments, researchers tested this by refueling the brains of some subjects performing tasks with sugary lemonade (glucose), and some with lemonade sweetened with diet sweetener (no glucose.) The results were clear: those who got the glucose found their willpower restored, and thus their ability to exercise self-control augmented. They made better choices, and even when asked to make financial decisions, they focused on long-term strategy rather than opting for a quick payoff. In short, more mental energy allowed them to persist in whatever task was at hand. Even more to the point, the researchers found that the effect of glucose was specific to certain areas of the brain. As Tierney puts it:

Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards, and pays less attention to long-term prospects.
This is critical information, especially in our choice-and-distraction-filled culture. Yet another study in Germany, where subjects were monitored by frequently reporting their activity via their Blackberries, concluded that people at work spend as much as 4 hours a day “resisting desire.” The most common of these desires were “urges to eat and sleep, followed by the urge for leisure” (i.e. taking a break by playing a computer game, etc.). Sexual urges were next on the list, slightly higher than checking Facebook or email. The most popular general type of desire was to find a distraction—and of course, the workplace of large numbers of people these days centers on the computer, that click-of-the-mouse distraction machine.

And the trouble with all this is that willpower depletion doesn’t manifest with a specific symptom, like a runny nose, or a pain in the gut. As Tierney says:

Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain’s regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful.
Perhaps this is why tired politicians so often say, and do stupid things. Not to mention the howlers of our physicians, our generals, our corporate execs, and our media pundits. Perhaps, too, it explains why Ronald Reagan always kept a jar of jellybeans on his desk—though it is true that his decision-making stemmed from a malady of a different sort.

In any case, the lesson from all this might be: take breaks. Eat candy (or better still, protein). And don’t make important decisions when you’re exhausted (like responding to that nasty email). Most decisions can wait, and will profit from a glucose-rich, rather than a glucose-depleted brain.

Lawrence DiStasi

Fear of Flying

2011-08-07T07:59:00.000-07:00

Where did the fireman go
Now that we need him so?
And where is the meat inspector
Ensuring our food’s not infected
And the maintenance director
Who saw that our planes were inspected?
Don’t they know we are dying
Instead of just flying?
And who are we to judge it
If we are not in the budget?
And budget is high in the protocol
But why do we subsidize alcohol?

We continue to hear the cry from the right for ”less government.” It sounds compelling, especially if you have just been pulled over by the Highway Patrol, but we need to drill a little deeper and examine where this cry comes from and where it is likely to go. It is essentially a Libertarian chant and not Republican in origin although the GOP has amplified the sound and added its own lyrics. This is where analogies get tenuous and less meaningful. Libertarians propose to limit government to the barest essentials such as providing for the common defense. I doubt they would believe that traffic lights are essential except where citizens did not jump out and voluntarily direct traffic. If nobody volunteered, they might have a car wash to pay for a traffic light. Eventually, they might contract with some vendor to provide a light but no government for safety. Most Libertarians dream of restoring the gold based monetary system with a few stalwarts actually insisting on using gold directly for financial transactions. Libertarians would restore “Caveat Emptor” to the fullest degree to take government out of any responsibility for any inspection or oversight. Hence, if somebody sold you a package labeled “Pure Beef,” and it was actually pork or canine in origin, you would have to take his word for it or sue in court if you somehow determined that fraud was committed. While that may seem easy enough for something you could taste, it might be difficult to determine that the medicine you purchased from a vendor contained the ingredients promised without a laboratory supporting your aspirin purchase. Still worse, if other unseen perils such as Salmonella or E. coli were included in your transaction, you would have to investigate and prove that in court, if you were lucky enough to live and could afford the research and lawsuit. Note that you no longer buy federally stamped inspected meat and poultry. That service was eliminated during Reagan’s tenure as President. During WW II when black market meat crept into the market, horse flesh was often substituted for beef. Government inspectors could not keep up with black market vendors. Libertarians are sometimes called ”pot smoking Republicans” because of their penchant for individual freedom over the common good or “commonwealth.” I once served on a school board for ten years and the district was fortunate enough to have a physician volunteer to conduct all entry and sports physicals for the trivial sum of $500 per year for the high and junior high schools. A Libertarian on the board insisted that we fire him and that individual families bear the cost of the required physicals which, then, cost about $150 each. Obviously, that was not a smooth economic move for the common good, but it highlighted individual responsibility, another Libertarian tenet.

Now we also have Republicans who hold many basic philosophies similar to Libertarians, but they have morphed into a different animal over time. While Libertarians simply feel that government should take on very few functions, Republicans in the past thirty years have become so distrustful of government, that they are attacking it and accusing government of some kind of willful attempt to annoy and even harm citizens. Government is described as incompetent and incapable of efficiency or effective systems or behavior. Government has become an almost mythical self that is capable of willful actions and it has become de-linked from the live people who actually run and constitute our government. This leads to some humorous situations when politicians and the hired mechanics of government criticize it as though they were having an out-of-body experience. We frequently hear and see elected Washington politicians speak of “Washington” not acknowledging that they themselves work in Washington. The pronoun “they” is almost always used and “we” is never used. Unlike Libertarians, Republicans have found that by joining together, they can become more powerful and can select those functions that are better implemented by the federal government such as having women take lectures on abortion paid for by government or perhaps government subsidy of religious counseling clinics such as that run by Marcus Bachman (Michele’s husband) that includes “curing” homosexuals. Separation of Church and State applies to Muslims, but not fundamentalist Christians. They boast of a “moral” agenda that has bankrolled legislation like stopping funding for NPR and Planned Parenthood while simultaneously demonstrating outrage at reducing funding for corporations who support their campaigns. So we are in one breath able to decry the waste of a few million dollars for NPR and defend both the Billions in subsidies for corn/ethanol production and the tariff that discourages importation of ethanol. And this is from the party of “free trade.” Ideology reigns supreme. Less humorous is the drastic reduction of police and firemen across the nation due to shriveled budgets.

Taxes are evil because they only encourage government that is inherently wasteful and evil and yet income to offset the condition of an unbalanced budget is also evil. Free trade is the only way out, unless it might diminish campaign financing. In the Republican frenzy to “kill the beast” (government), they have taken an oath to Grover Norquist) a non-elected person who has become famous for his statement that he does not want to kill government but only to shrink it to a point where it can be dragged into the bathroom and drowned in the bathtub. While most of us would see an inherent conflict in his statement since drowning is killing, there are sincere Republicans who hold the Norquist oath at least as seriously as their oath of office. Defining “tax” then becomes a delightful fantasy where stripping any subsidy to a friend of the party is tax-like and removing the subsidy is anathema. So GE gets $ 1 Billion in subsidies and can shift its work overseas with impunity as is true for Exxon-Mobil and dozens of other large firms. Not coincidentally, negotiations with persons not party to the oath are a charade because no “new” income will be permitted by the GOP in budget talks. This total intransigence has recently been in the spotlight as we both cut the budget as raised the debt ceiling. The GOP refused to consider even a dollar of income. And this is in the time of the lowest taxes since 1928. Our system of government assumed compromise for the common good, but it is no longer common. The first decline of our national credit rating noted the inability of our elected officials to reach agreement during the process. The $4.7 trillion promoted by Obama was rejected by House Republicans because it contained “income enhancements,” and yet that is the general figure that Standard and Poors saw we needed for AAA.

We have some serious problems to solve in our republic. When any party, but mainly the GOP in the past 30 years, hews to partisan advantage OVER public good, problems become insurmountable. Over these past 30 years we have seen partisan use of a war to denounce critics, even in the case of Iraq that was a war of choice against a country that had never attacked us and yet criticism was assailed as unpatriotic. This constant attack mode had Senator Mitch McConnell openly stating that his number one goal is to make President Obama a one term president. Polls consistently indicate that about 70% of all voters and more than half of registered Republicans favor an elimination of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and yet the mantra for no “tax increase” remains strident and strong despite the people’s wishes.

Most recently, besides the debt ceiling fiasco, the GOP blocked funding the FAA because they wanted no unions. As a result, aircraft safety inspections were threatened, over 4,000 FAA workers were furloughed and over 70,000 construction workers at dozens of airports also were idled. The issue Republicans claimed blocked agreement was the voting rule for union recognition. The GOP wanted a rule where absence from voting would be considered a “NO” vote (instead of majority rule). Can you imagine what that would mean in any election? It also cost our republic $400 Million in uncollected ticket taxes that became a windfall for airlines (except Alaska and Spirit). But beyond that side partisan attack on unions is the frontal assault on the safety of the flying public. Do you fear flying? Given current events, maybe you should.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
7 August 2011

Waka in Bolinas

2011-08-03T19:43:00.000-07:00

I was just finishing morning meditation when my neighbor Walter knocked on the door. Toting two cameras, he said, “Come on. You have to see this.” I asked what, as I was getting my shoes on, thinking it might be a large yacht or perhaps some monster pieces of the Bay Bridge nearing completion (we saw some heading to the Golden Gate a couple years ago, shipped in from China where they’d been fabricated). He said nope, and we walked across the field to the cliff overlooking Bolinas Bay. And there lined up was a fleet of seven boats, with these strange double sails that looked a bit like felucca sails on the old fishing boats Italians used to fish San Francisco bay with. Walter had his high-powered binoculars on a tripod so I was able to get a pretty good look. We could see crews on board each strangely marked boat, plus a white yacht accompanying them. At least one Bolinas fishing boat motored out to talk to them and, I found out later, bring them ice cream. Then it became apparent that these were catamarans, double canoes of traditional Maori design, their red sails and prows decorated with fantastic Maori art forms.

Walter explained what he knew. The boats were from New Zealand, and they were on a Pacific voyage to try to draw attention, via traditional sailing craft, to the plight of the oceans and the related plight of many Pacific Islanders threatened by global warming. They were sailing to San Francisco today, to take part in a World Oceans conference for a week. Then they’d head back to New Zealand, probably stopping again at Hawaii where they’d already been, and other Pacific islands from which their crews had come. That they’d decided to stop in Bolinas for the night added a bit of local pride to the visual thrill. Walter had actually seen them yesterday when fishing for salmon (some of which he gave me) out beyond Point Reyes.

I did a little search on the web and eventually found several accounts of what now seemed an almost magical voyage. What I learned was that the Waka (or vaka; the name of their boats) voyagers had left New Zealand on April 13, after traditional ceremonies, and headed for several other islands as well as Hawaii and the U.S. mainland. According to Hoturoa Kerr, chief of the Haunui waka,

“We’ve got people here whose islands have been covered by rising water levels and their fishing grounds are no longer as abundant. We’re trying to raise awareness to people who live thousands of miles away that what they do affects ordinary people who are, in some cases, subsistence living.” (Otago Daily Times, April 13, 2011).
Kerr also pointed out the “eco friendly” nature of the boats, constructed of carved wood and twine, and which use sail power supplemented by solar-powered motors for harbor navigation. Their food would consist of a great deal (they hoped) of caught fish, plus canned and dried goods and locally-produced organic food. They intended, said Dieter Paulmann, filming the voyage for a documentary, to “map their way in the wake of their ancestors, using the stars, sun, wind, and wildlife as their guides.” The plan was to reach Hawaii by early June where the crews would attend the Kava Bowl Summit 2011 for discussions with scientists, media, political and corporate leaders to create ways to move toward the sustainable use of the ocean’s resources. Then it was on to San Francisco for another ocean conference on Treasure Island, with the return via numerous other Pacific islands, and the 11th Pacific Arts Festival on the Solomon Islands in 2012.

By the time we saw them in Bolinas, the wakas had already labored through the Pacific gyre where a revolting “continent” of plastic debris has taken up residence (see my June 6, 2008, blog, “Plastics etc.”). They had been through storms and food deprivation, as well as space deprivation (16 crew members on each 22-foot craft don’t have much space). But they were clear about their mission. The voyage was a kind of dress rehearsal for what humans were going to have to do on a larger scale: adapt to dwindling natural resources. Here are a few entries from their website--http://www.pacificvoyagers.org/-- blogs:

After a few minutes of deep breathing and relaxing my mind I got the image of a whale’s tail in my head. It slapped the water. “Listen. Listen to the breathing of the tides and know that all the world beats with one heart, breathes with one breath. I started getting distracted by the music and noise behind me. Slap, slap, slap. “Listen, listen, listen! You (humanity, the waka crews, us as individuals) have a special place. You are the Key….
We do have a special place. It is by our hand that the world and the creatures in it will live or die….
We’ve been becalmed for two days and for two days we’ve been surrounded by all the Life in the sea. Well, seals, dolphins and whales, lots of them. Last night the seals were coming in like aquabats (acrobats with a speech impediment) zigzagging in formation thru the phosphorescence leaving trails of stars behind them. They’ve scared the girls by popping up beside the canoe and barking loudly. They’ve entertained us with their showing off, leaping and jumping, one even going so far as climbing on board the Samoan canoe and sitting on the bow doing nothing and barking at the captain whenever he talked to it (just like the rest of the crew so he tells me)….
And if we hadn’t been halted by the wind we would’ve missed it all. We would’ve zoomed on thru as we do for most of lives, distracted by the music and the white noise of the modern world and really just missing the point.
“Listen, listen, listen!”
and another:
We were told today in an email (thank you Shantparv) that our entry has coincided perfectly with a phase described in the Mayan calendar wherein a great unfolding of consciousness is seen for the first time. I’m all for that! I think a great unfolding of consciousness is somewhat overdue. I think our consciousness has been folded for a very long time. It’s time to take out the creases and realise we’re all on the same page! The healing of the planet will by necessity include the healing of ourselves. We are all essentially the same. We experience all the same stuff in human terms. The words we use to describe Life, the Universe and Everything don’t really matter.
Some lovely photos and quite a few videos are available for viewing on the Pacific Voyage website (http://pacificvoyagers.org/). That’s probably the best way to get a sense of the visual impact these boats and their crews make. Indeed, it’s something no one should miss—though I have to admit that seeing them off my own home coast gave it added juice for me. But you can also “join” they voyage by following along online and sending messages to the crew; they truly appreciate the support and the knowledge that someone is paying attention. And hadn’t we all better do that? The time for action is getting very very short.

Lawrence DiStasi

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The Real GOP Agenda

2011-08-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

In the crisis over approving a rise in the debt ceiling which they themselves created, the Republican Party has reached a new high in hypocrisy and cruelty, not to mention madness. But since calling someone “insane” tends to let him or her off the hook (see Anders Breivik and his 1500-page manifesto), I’ll table that as well as the hypocrisy and get to the point. The GOP has a clear agenda—to cut government to the bone—and that is what needs to be examined. This is because it is obvious that the GOP doesn’t seem to have any problem with government handouts—so long as the handouts go to banks/Wall Street execs, military contractors, weapons manufacturers, oil companies, big Pharma and giant agribusinesses. They also don’t seem to have any axe to grind when it comes to government privileges for their favorite fundamentalist churches and anti-science wackadoos. What they have set their sights on are “entitlement” programs for the poor, the elderly, the underprivileged: you know, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Nevermind that Social Security is paid for over a lifetime of labor by those who get it (providing, by the way, a handy fund for the politicians themselves to “borrow” from whenever they need a little extra cash for a war they refuse to pay for). Nevermind that without Medicare, millions would be deprived of the minimal care that can’t even approach the luxurious health plan the pols have crafted for themselves. The most visible targets are government agencies like the EPA, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Parks, the Department of Education, Head Start, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, OSHA etc; and at the local level, the public schools, the public colleges, the parole and prison departments, and all departments that service, again, the poor, the unprivileged young, the elderly, the handicapped. What they can’t get rid of, they will try to privatize—again for the benefit of their corporate funders.

Consider a few lines from a piece by Nicholas Kristof (“Republicans, Zealots and Our Security”) in last Sunday’s NY Times. He first quotes Congresswoman Rosa Di Lauro:

“The attack on literacy programs reflects a broader assault on education programs,” said Rosa DeLauro, a Democratic member of Congress from Connecticut. She notes that Republicans want to cut everything from early childhood programs to Pell grants for college students. Republican proposals have singled out some 43 education programs for elimination, but it’s not seen as equally essential to end tax loopholes on hedge fund managers.
So let’s remember not only the national security risks posed by Iran and Al Qaeda. Let’s also focus on the risks, however unintentional, from domestic zealots.
What struck me in this last line was Kristof’s qualifier: “however unintentional.” The truth is, the GOP’s rampage against “bloated government” is both quite rational and viciously intentional (again, Anders Breivik comes to mind). It is to gut every program put together by Democrats from FDR’s Depression programs to LBJ’s Great Society, programs to provide not just a minimal safety net for the least fortunate Americans, but opportunity for all those who have been able, finally, to gain a tentative purchase on a decent life by finding government jobs at various levels. This is the whole point of the GOP’s coordinated campaign to destroy unions, “cut waste from government,” and cut taxes. It’s about eliminating the revenue source for those government jobs. It’s about cutting off the voter base—mostly Democrat—that those government jobs represent. And at its core, it’s about putting back in their place—at the lowest levels of society—all those “uppity” minorities who, through government equal-employment mandates, have ‘risen above their station.’ This includes blacks, Hispanics, and women, as well as the lefties and liberals who have long argued for the inclusion of such minorities in America’s prosperity.

It is this that most grates on the Republican zealots—now concentrated more than ever in the South and the West/Midwest. They hate the fact that teachers have tenure and all those “luxurious” pension plans. They hate the perceived “laziness” of government workers with “cushy” jobs and pension plans. Though it may bring them down as well (and it is doing just that; the massive loss of government jobs in the wake of the 2008 collapse is responsible for a large part of the high and persistent unemployment rate), they are willing to sacrifice their own well-being in order to appease their toxic resentment. This resentment is clear in the symbolic language (“to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”) used by the guru of this movement, Grover Norquist. Drown it in the bathtub? What is the size Norquist means here? Baby size? Are we to imagine an infant drowned in a bathtub? Who would use such imagery? A privatizing Republican zealot, that’s who. An artist of propaganda, of revenge, of cruelty. The heir to those massive crowds in the pre- and post-Civil War South who could relish the spectacle of torturing, burning, hanging a human being who had dared to transgress their sacred code of two worlds that could never, ever meet.

And with a black man in the White House, that resentment has only festered and grown more virulent, more ugly. Of course not even the most conservative of GOP leaders can come right out and give this voice. So they use the symbolic language of cutting taxes to cut government spending.

But don’t be fooled. If you’re wondering why the GOP is hell-bent on destroying government (even as Republicans and their corporate masters suck from the tit of that same government, and display a fierce determination to re-take its most visible power source), you can start with two simple but toxic causes: racism and resentment. Then add the infinite greed and casual cruelty of the elite (the top 1% of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 90% combined; median wealth of Anglo households is now 20 times that of black households—see July 27 Pew Research report), and you’re pretty much there.

Lawrence DiStasi

Mondegreens

2011-07-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

I was reading James Gleick’s new book, The Information, the other day, and came across this new (relatively; it was added to dictionaries in this century) word that struck me as both hilarious and fertile. It’s mondegreen, and it refers to a situation that most of us have experienced at one time or another: You hear a line of poetry or music, and interpret it in your own unique—and erroneous—way. Here’s the type case, recorded by Sylvia Wright in her essay “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” published in Harper’s in 1954. As a girl, Wright wrote, she misheard the ballad “The Bonny Earl O’Moray,” which her mother would always read to her, as follows:

"Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O’ Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen."

This made sense to a young girl, until she discovered the real last line:

“And laid him on the green.”

As I thought about this later, it sounded more and more hilarious, perhaps because I heard a mondegreen even more ridiculous when I was a child. It involved the Lord’s Prayer, whose last line (in the Catholic rendering) was: “And deliver us from evil.” Now for some reason, that didn’t make sense to me—I suppose because I knew about delivering things to someone, but what could possibly be meant by delivering me from something, and particularly something like “evil.” What, I was to become a package that the Lord would deliver? Whatever the reason, instead of “from,” I heard “And deliver us strom evil,” which of course doesn’t make sense either, but that’s how I heard it. To my 6- or 7-year old mind, it apparently made more sense. I can’t even remember when I figured out the real words.

It appears that lots of people have mondegreens in their past, and maybe in their present too. Here are some others Wright herself suggested:

Surely Good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life ("Surely goodness and mercy…" from Psalm 23 )
The wild, strange battle cry "Haffely, Gaffely, Gaffely, Gonward." ("Half a league, half a league,/ Half a league onward," from "The Charge of the Light Brigade ").

Wikipedia provides more examples, the first from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, whose top all-time favorite submissions from readers include:

“There's a bathroom on the right (the line at the end of each verse of "Bad Moon Rising " by Creedence Clearwater Revival : "There's a bad moon on the rise")

This points to Gleick’s notion that mondegreens have been proliferating more lately due to mass forms of communication such as the internet. Thus, the most misheard lyric of all time may be a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light,” where the line, “revved up like a deuce,” is heard by millions as “wrapped up like a douche.”

What’s behind mondegreens is the simple, but not obvious fact that our perceptions are not passive, but actively constructed by our brains. Our brains constantly seek meaning in what we see, hear, smell, touch. If what we perceive doesn’t make sense to us (at whatever age or level of understanding), then our brains construct an interpretation that fits our understanding or our preferences or our expectations based on the world we commonly experience. Since lyrics in music are notoriously hard to understand, it is often lyrics that get mangled into mondegreens. What may be oddest about mondegreens, though, is what cognitive scientist Steven Pinker notes about them: “that the mishearings are generally less plausible than the intended lyrics.” To wit, “deliver us strom evil.”

Implausible or ridiculous or silly, something about these things just tickles me. Here are some more.

Bennie and the Jets: “She’s got electric boots, a mohair suit.”
mondegreen: “She’s got electric boobs, and mohair shoes.”
Malachy McCourt, from the Hail Mary: “Blessed art Thou amongst women.”
mondegreen: “Blessed art Thou a monk swimming.”
Beverly Cleary’s Ramona on The Star Spangled Banner: “By the dawn’s early light.”
mondegreen: “By the dawnzer lee light.”
“Away in a Manger:” “The cattle are lowing/ The poor Baby wakes”
mondegreen: “The cattle are lonely…”
“God Rest Ye merry, Gentlemen:” “God rest ye merry, gentlemen/ Let nothing you dismay”
mondegreen: “Get dressed ye married gentlemen/ Let nothing through this May.”
“The Pledge of Allegiance:” “I pledge allegiance to the flag.”
mondegreen: “I led the pigeons to the flag.”
“He’s Got the Whole World:” “He’s got the whole world in his hand”
mondegreen: “He’s got the whole world in his pants.”
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds:” “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes”
mondegreen: “The girl with colitis goes by.”

What more is there to say? Perhaps to recommend just a little more ability to laugh at ourselves: We so often get the words, and the world, wrong.

Lawrence DiStasi

Paradise Lost

2011-07-27T17:38:00.000-07:00

Today we search for the prize
Of an earthly Paradise
Where pain and fear are spent
Only heaven knows where it went
Because pain is up with the rent
And the future is broken and bent
Promises made to compromise
Are meeting an old demise
In the rise of the ideologues
And making of deeper bogs
Along with a feudal caste
To fight the wars and to die
To hold the wealthy on high
Lest they pay a small fee
For another’s dignity

Today, we are in a stew of our own making. Compromise cannot exist in the conflict of ideology and reality. We see this in multiple ways. Even the recent murders committed by Anders Breivik of Norway were committed in the name of fundamentalist Christianity. Ironically, “Anders” is pronounced “Honors” for those who note such things. The murders are not simply excused by his fundamentalism, but his fundamentalism compelled him to take direct action against fellow Christians in order to stem the growing Islamic menace. Now surely, that concept sounds insane, but not to the fundamentalist mind. I will venture that fundamentalism itself is a greater predictor of behavior than any underlying philosophy. In other words, Christian, Islamic and Jewish, Sikh, or any other philosophy has less impact than fundamentalism itself. A fundamentalist Christian has more in common with a fundamentalist Muslim than a Baptist to a Lutheran within the Christian experience, etc. Recently, on announcing her candidacy for president, Michele Bachman resigned from a fundamentalist Lutheran Church (Salem Lutheran) that denounces Christians and terms the Pope the Antichrist. Ms. Bachman very suddenly recognized that her fundamentalism might be exposed for what it is and she withdrew from membership without condemning Salem Lutheran. In Waco, Davidians chose death by fire over compromise. Fundamentalists in Jonestown, Guiana chose the poisoned Kool-Aid over compromise. Father Feeney who announced that there was no salvation outside the Catholic Church in the 1950s commanded a following until he was excommunicated for his fundamentalism. That is their common bond. Absolutism in ideology means there shall be no compromise. Yes, death over compromise. Excommunication over compromise. Vicious assault over compromise. Kill friend and foe alike but do not compromise.

Currently, we have calls for compromise in the debt ceiling negotiations between our two major political parties. Over 250 national elected representatives, almost exclusively Republican, have signed the Grover Norquist pledge to not raise taxes. There are far more in state legislatures. That might not be so bad except for how they interpret tax raises. Eliminating the $Billion in subsidies to GE which is currently in the process of moving its medical imaging leadership and production to China, is interpreted as a tax increase, therefore any plan to remove the subsidy is tantamount to a tax increase, albeit for a corporation and against our national interest to subsidize creation of jobs outside these United States. Michele Bachman has not only signed the pledge, she has openly stated that she will not vote for raising the debt ceiling. It is against her principles. This was clearly spoken by a woman from the party of Cheney who said “Deficits don’t matter,” at a time when Bush put two wars “off the books.” Tea Party fundamentalists are first fundamentalists and then Republican or Democrat or Libertarian. There can be no compromise with ideologues unless one considers adoption of the fundamentalist position as a compromise by all the others party to a dispute. Calls to compromise are effectively calls for unconditional surrender. If House Speaker John Boehner appears to be waffling and uncertain as to defining his position, remember that he is facing President Obama on one side and his own fundamentalist Tea Party “Republicans” on the other. He must adopt their position or face ouster from his position. Mr. Eric Cantor is waiting impatiently to take over if Mr. Boehner falters. Do not forget that Mr. Cantor is selling T-Bills short in order to make a few bucks on the impending financial calamity. Ideology has its rewards, I guess. Do not bet that protecting the United States will overcome these ideologues regarding the arbitrary deficit ceiling. Another characteristic of fundamentalists is that facts don’t matter. Ron Paul (Libertarian-Republican) is looking forward to the default of our national credit for the return of the gold standard. The likelihood of that outcome is zero, but that does not matter to Paul or other fundamentalists. Think of a child who believes in Santa Claus and is immune to cues to the contrary. That describes the fundamentalist and the child-like faith that, despite abundant contrary information, the ideology is goodness itself. Either they believe that great good will arise from destroying our economy or perhaps that the economy will not be destroyed. Much as true believers of Communism believed that Paradise would be achieved through the withering away of the State, these fundamentalists believe that Paradise will be achieved by insignificant government, zero taxes and elimination of all the social safety nets. Dignity for Grandma in her dotage? Hell no. She needs to get rich or die. She got lazy or unlucky or lived too damned long with healthcare provided by the “job creators.” “Job creators,” too, is a myth unsupported by facts or history, but what are facts compared to an ideology?

Recently, it has become clear that we have contrasting visions of America. We have the ideologues who profess that economic Darwinism is our goal and may those who achieve the most toys rule those who did not. They see no socialism in blind subsidy of “conservative” wealthy people and corporations They see socialism in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. We also have those who have contributed to the common good by paying their fair share of taxes, contributed to Medicare and Social Security and hope to live out their years. “Shrink government!” shout the ideologues and yet they would expand government by gaming national laws to make our nation as one in access to guns but not access to healthcare or women’s reproductive rights. They would expand the power of corporations but shrink the power of unions that might fight for a fair share of the economic pie. It is tragic, that the ideologues who practice economic Darwinism actually forbid Darwin’s theory from being taught because it conflicts with their ideology that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and that their ideology should be given the upper hand in schools and courts. Man shall have dominion over the earth and everything on it. It matters not that “man” is defined narrowly to include the ideologues and exclude you. We faced this in the 1920s and it took a massive depression to change our hearts. Is history being recycled?

Peace,
George Giacoppe
28 July 2011

Exposing False Dogma

2011-07-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

One thing a political party should never, ever, do is to allow your most basic core principal to be demonstrated to be false. If you have been saying for generations that taxing the rich and the corporations is bad for the economy and cost American jobs. The worst thing you could possibly do is to give the other side the opportunity to show that it just isn’t true, never was true, and the American public just won’t buy that song and dance any more. For thirty years Republicans have been chanting the mantra that lower taxes and less regulation on corporations will create jobs and strengthen the economy. Just recently, Arizona Senator John Kyle ®, stated on Meet the Press that “The last thing we want to do in the middle of a recession is raise taxes.” Of course what he is really talking about is raising taxes on the corporations and the rich because the President and the Democrats aren‘t talking about raising taxes on the middle class and the poor whether there is a recession or not. So that irrelevant argument by Republicans is nothing more than a straw man to be set up and knocked down. That’s not even on the table and even Republicans don’t have the gall to say let’s increase taxes on the poor so we can give even bigger tax cuts to the rich. That would make it just way too obvious to working people what their real goals are.

In 2010 corporate profits grew by 81% for a total of nearly $10.8 trillion, almost as much as the national debt. The supposed justification for the lower tax rates and government subsidizes to companies that are making record profits is that they are going to create more jobs with all that profit. Still, unemployment is up because those corporations continue to cut jobs, outsource jobs and lavishly reward their CEOs instead of rewarding their workers for being more productive. There simply is no compelling evidence that lower tax rates on high income earners trickles down to the rest of us and makes us more competitive in the world market.

Before Ronald Reagan was President (1965 - 1981) the top tax rate was 70% for those making $215,400. Before that, from 1954 - 1963 it was 75% on $100,000, so according to present day Republican logic the economy and unemployment must have been really bad. While there is no direct correlation between tax rates, the state of the economy and unemployment due to other factors the figures generally show that when tax rates were high the economy was usually pretty good and unemployment was low.

In 1944 the top tax rate was 94% and unemployment was at its 1.5%; its lowest point in history, but that was at the end of World War II. Up until Ronald Reagan the national debt was very low compared to GDP and unemployment hit a post World War II low of 3.6% when Lyndon Johnson was President and created many government programs that created jobs and needed services. Under Democrats and Republicans the unemployment rate was fairly low. In 1982 the top tax rate was cut to 50% on $172,250 and in 1987 in went dramatically down to 38.5% on $90,000. In 1982 unemployment soared to 9.7% and the national debt as a percentage of GDP shot up to 11.3% and in his 2nd term it went up another 9.3%. The situation got even worse under George H. W. Bush when the debt went up 13% of GDP and the economy went into recession. Clinton reduced the rate to 9% and 0.7% in his 2nd term. George W. Bush increased that debt rate to 7.1% and 20.7% in his 2nd term. Taking over in an economic meltdown with nothing but obstruction to his attempts to bring the economy back President Obama has increased the deficit rate to 9% of GDP while inheriting two wars. Also when Clinton took office unemployment was 7.5% and it was 4% when he left. When George W. took over with a Republican Congress the present historically low rate of 35% of $373,651 was established and is the top rate today. That is a lot of statistics but so often the truth lies in the numbers and not in the rhetoric.
Republicans claim that ending the Bush tax cuts would hurt small businesses but in fact CNN reported in 2008 that only 1.4% of small businesses would pay more. Fully a third of the Bush tax cuts went to the top 1% while the bottom 20% gained only 0.4% as the deficit skyrocketed. The dividend and capital gains cuts saw 70% of that money going to the top 2%. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) wrote that of eleven potential economic stimulus programs the extension of all the Bush tax cuts were the least effective of any plan. Perhaps a major factor in the lack of job creation due to low tax rates on the rich is that when they had to pay 70% or more they choose to invest the extra money in expanding the company instead of paying it in taxes to the government. Or, they my have given workers raises or benefits, but now that they can keep 2/3 or more of what they make they simply opt to be fabulously wealthy.

There are some things that can be demonstrated to be true by so much scientific evidence that it is hard to believe that any well informed, rational person could have serious doubts. Economic theories over time can be tested by data. However, these results are frequently open to interpretation; also known as spin. The Republicans have numerous foundations, such as the Heritage Foundation, established by wealthy benefactors whose main purpose is to convince the public that the evidence shows that by transferring their money to the rich and the corporations is somehow in their best interest.

We need to stop being so polite when Republicans tell lies. Every time they say, “We need to cut taxes not raise them.” or “Now is not a good time to raise taxes.” Or “We need a smaller government.” We need to call them on it and not just give them a pass on it because a lie told over and over will begin to sound like the truth if it isn’t challenged every single time. They can’t prove these statements because the evidence doesn’t support their claims and they heavily rely on the voter having a short selective memory. Only by picking and choosing their data can they make the case that giving billions to corporations and the rich creates jobs. That is not the scientific method its just propaganda.

We need to raise taxes on the rich so they start paying their fair share again. Not just because it’s fair but because government serves the needs of the people better that way. History has shown the economy works better when the top rate is at least 50%. President Obama is right about needing a fair and balanced approach on dealing with a deficit that is unsustainable. Now is a good time to eliminate the Bush tax breaks on the rich because the national debt is too high and we need to start paying it down.

Dave Silva

Which Side; the Looking Glass

2011-07-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

Ah the beauty of greed
It fits nearly everyone’s need
To the haves; an excuse
To have-nots, it’s a noose
And it drives the gears of the mill
To grind out the hope of the poor
Who pray for fairness and bread
But then get blocked by a door
That’s closed until they are dead
Only then do they find their true worth
When the meek shall inherit the earth

In the latest Washington drama, shared sacrifice is taking on an entirely new meaning. For the wealthy, it portends a return to the roaring ‘20s when wealthy investors lived the high life and broke all the rules. Their share was and is in the here and now. Your share is in the hereafter, so please be patient. Eric Cantor, the Republican Majority Leader of the House of Representatives is exclaiming that the right wing and Tea Party are compromising simply by meeting with Democrats and moderate Republicans. Of course. Forgive me for being suspicious. This is the very same Eric Cantor who has invested in selling T-bills short in order to make some money while engaged in the process of “negotiating” the debt ceiling. Now let me see. Cantor is threatening to make our national credit worthless at the very same time he is investing: betting that the price of 20 year Treasuries will decline. For most people, that would be worse than a conflict of interest. A simple conflict of interest is when a person has insider knowledge and uses it for personal gain. Almost no person would be so greedy as to take part in the process of affecting the value of his investment by political posturing, but Cantor is no ordinary greedy investor. He needs to twist the outcome. Forgive me again. Most people would see that action as a conflict of interest because they have assumed that Cantor has an interest in the common good of the United States as well as his own profit and welfare. Maybe if you think that way, you are making the wrong assumption. What if Eric’s only interest is Eric Cantor? Where is the conflict then? Aha! Eric is in the camp of those who hate government and then work hard to damage it to prove their point that government cannot work. Cantor has no conflict of interest if his only interest is Cantor.

Surely, Cantor is only one man and not a movement. Maybe he simply made a bad investment and has a pure heart. While Cantor is disturbing enough, let us look at the entire process. Senator Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, has publicly stated that his number one political priority is to make President Obama a one-term president, and not to consider “jobs” or “infrastructure investment.” The GOP as a whole has embraced the Grover Norquist pledge of not increasing taxes. That sounds a little limiting if not insane, but when coupled with a hatred of government (Norquist: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”) Norquist then explains that he want to privatize and outsource any remaining functions.

If you understand that “Pledgers” also have a unique definition of “raising taxes,” the view in the looking glass becomes a bit clearer. Federal subsidies are seen as “negative taxes,” therefore by reducing or eliminating the $ Billion we give to General Electric, we are “raising taxes” and that is forbidden by Norquist. Hence, in today’s economy, there can be no increase to the income side of the ledger. An income increase violates the Norquist pledge. So up is down and left is right. And if you don’t do it my way, it’s NO way at all. Look closer. If we fail to honor our debts on time, then interest rates will soar and our national financial stability is gone, perhaps forever. Who stands to lose the most? Who buys on interest using credit cards? If only cuts are made to reduce the deficit and the largest single item of the budget is made exempt (military budget), then what will be eliminated? Could it be that Medicare will be eliminated? Could Social Security then be sacrificed on the altar of expediency? Could roads and bridges and other investment in infrastructure be cut? Could education for the middle and lower classes be cut? Bet on it, but use toothpicks or old buttons. You are going to need every penny you get simply to live until you file for bankruptcy and beyond. Forget the dignity that FDR afforded for Americans reaching old age. The only good thing is that you may die sooner since health care will be for the wealthy who can afford the care or the insurance to get it.
The mama bears, Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin have come out for default. That is the same Michelle Bachman that has taken about $30,000 in federal and state subsidies through her husband’s “religious” counseling business that recently was exposed for claiming to “cure” homosexuality. Similarly, she is a partner in a dairy farm that has taken nearly $260,000 in federal subsidies. Profits from that farm according to disclosure reports are between $32,503 and $105,000 for the years 2006-2009. While Ms. Bachman condemns subsidies and “earmarks,” she has been a major recipient. Is this a conflict of interest issue? How about a church and state issue? Of course not. Again, Michelle Bachman holds a predominant interest in her own welfare. Do not expect her to fight Grover Norquist, after all. Giving up a subsidy is exactly like a tax increase according to the party line. I have to assume that Bachman feels that even if the nation defaults that she will still get her subsidies.

Sarah Palin has likewise condemned subsidies and yet her recent reality TV special “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” got $1.2 million in subsidies from the state based on a law she signed in 2008. Apart from the sheer hypocrisy of these “ladies,” their claim of the government having a spending problem instead of an income problem is an interesting diversion. “Government Spending” is not included in their description of their own subsidies. I guess they deserve subsidies and a pensioner on Medicare should be immediately weaned from that dependence. I have never seen socialism so neatly compartmented. When Michelle and Sarah get subsidies, it is not socialism. When Grandma gets a wheel chair it is.

If all this seems confusing, you simply do not understand. Michelle and Sarah are only grudgingly taking these subsidies to be true to Grover Norquist, while Grandma is a societal leach. Besides, it is a religious certainty that Grandma will inherit the earth if she is meek enough. Now if she organizes and attempts to get power to get her benefits on this side of the grave, then shame on Grandma. She may lose her heavenly inheritance. All this should remind us of the danger of organized religions that are so often manipulated to protect an outcome desired by its leaders and members (constituents when you mix church and state). Michelle Bachman, until the past few weeks when she declared her presidential candidacy, was a member of a right wing Lutheran church that condemns Roman Catholics and strictly adheres to Martin Luther’s condemnation of Jews. On the upside, if Michelle and Sarah get their way, then Grandma will get her heavenly inheritance a little sooner with diminished healthcare. Since Marcus Bachman, Michelle’s husband has declared gays, “barbarians,” there has been some confusion about his role in “curing” homosexuals although he is not certified as a counselor. TV footage of Marcus suggests that he may be too light on his feet when he dances, thus creating an image of hypocrisy in his religious counseling as well as questions as to why this activity does not violate the separation of church and state. Michelle’s pastor at the Salem Lutheran Church has been asked not to comment on Michelle’s departure. She has been linked with preacher Bradlee Dean who has conducted strong anti-gay programs through his business and has tried to link President Obama with Osama bin Laden to disparage the president. Economics and hate in the ‘20s was much the same but without Twitter. Hoover personally appealed to the nation’s Community Chest organizations rather than spend a penny on the jobless for fear that they may be motivated not to work if they got government help.

All this seems to suggest that the looking glass for these conservative ideologues does not present them with the same image that we get from our weak eyes. They see beauty while we see greed. They see piety, while we see hate. They see knowledge while we see ignorance. They see justice while we see unfairness. They are sharing our sacrifice by taking the dregs of this futile existence on earth and allowing us to have the far greater rewards of the next life. Now whom are you going to believe? Are you going to believe your lying eyes and ears and heart or are you going to believe these tortured souls who tell you we should default on the debt and confidence in our United States? Come on nation. Suck it up Americans and sacrifice now so you will inherit the earth only a little later.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
18 July 2011

And Justice for All

2011-07-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

I have to tell you: I’m no fan of the so-called “justice system” in America these days. “Liberty and Justice for All?” Don’t make me laugh. Because what we have is a system that has become so rigged—against the poor and unfortunate, in favor of the rich and powerful—that the line in the Pledge of Allegiance begins to seem a sick joke.

Consider just some recent instances. Jaycee Dugard just gave her first in-depth interview to one of our blonde sweeties on TV, and though what she said had mostly sentimental interest (we all wait breathlessly for such people to cry or at least tear up), the reminder of how easily a convicted sex offender outwitted his parole officers for 18 years—officers who made over 60 visits to the property where Phillip Garrido held Tracey and her two children without ever once thinking to look in the backyard; with one such visit actually videotaped by Garrido’s “wife” showing this idiot parole officer being led around the house and ushered out the door before he could even think to ask about the backyard horror show—leaves one gasping for breath. So does the reminder that after a neighbor called 911 to report the presence of two young girls in this sex offender’s backyard, a sheriff was duly dispatched to the place BUT limited his visit to the front porch and some fluff questions of Garrido, again without ever looking into the backyard! Even when the parole department was informed by a UC Berkeley policewoman that she had seen Garrido on campus several times with two young girls who appeared “robotic,” these cretins tried to explain the young girls away as “perhaps his granddaughters.” Until some Sherlock realized that since Garrido had no daughters, granddaughters might be problematic, and so called him in; whereupon he solved their case for them by bringing in the whole family, Dugard and all.

Now mix with what Frontline displayed on their riveting program this week. Titled “The Confessions,” it related the case of the “Norfolk 4,” a group of US Navy underlings who ran into the buzz saw of a rape/murder case and paid dearly (no “support our troops” blather here). That is, a fellow Navy man returned to his garden apartment to find his wife Michelle Bosko raped and murdered, whereupon his neighbor Danial Williams, himself married for little more than a week, came to his aid, called 911, and reported the crime. Enter the brilliant cops of Norfolk, VA, who decided it was this good Samaritan neighbor who had done the deed, and called him in for questioning. “Questioning” is a euphemism here, for after the female detective, Maureen Evans, in charge was unable to wring a confession out of Williams, she called in the “bulldog” of the force, Detective Robert Glenn Ford. Ford was notorious for his interrogation technique, one apparently modeled on Rambo types like Sipowicz on NYPD Blue. And sure enough, after about eleven hours of denials, and assurances that he had failed his lie detector test (he hadn’t), Danial Williams succumbed to Ford’s grilling and confessed. Not only did he confess, he gave details of the crime, such as beating Michelle with his shoe. The only problem was that Danial’s confession didn’t match the forensics; Michelle wasn’t hit with a shoe, she was stabbed and strangled. Danial was then induced to amend his confession to match the details he had been given by the detectives (itself a crime), and the investigation was closed.

But four months later, another problem: Danial’s DNA didn’t match the semen recovered from the crime scene. Now, rather than admitting their mistake, detectives “reasoned” that there must be an accomplice, and they picked up Williams’ roommate on the USS Saipan, Joe Dick. It was now Dick’s turn to be grilled by Detective Ford. And eventually, the poor sailor confessed as well, actually coming to believe that he had been involved in the crime (he hadn’t). The police then asked for his DNA and he gave both hair and blood samples thinking he’d surely be in the clear. But though his DNA didn’t (and couldn’t) match the crime, this didn’t exonerate him either; the Norfolk police simply concluded that there must be yet another accomplice, and grilled Dick to supply one.

To make a long story short, the police eventually got no less than seven men charged as accomplices in the crime. Four of them (Williams, Dick, Eric Wilson, Derek Tice), after intense interrogations, gave the police confessions, and under pressure even named three others (Rick Pauley, Geoffrey Farris, John Danser) as accomplices. Still, though, that pesky DNA match refused to turn up. What is even more bizarre is that a DNA match did eventually turn up; it belonged to a sex offender in prison, Omar Abdul Ballard, who wrote to a friend boasting that it had been he who had raped and murdered Michelle Bosko. The letter made its way to the police, and when Ballard’s DNA was compared to that found at the crime scene, it matched. Now, at last, the police had their man. Surely the others would be released; or at least this is the way it would have happened on TV. But this was real life in a real case, with defendants who are not wealthy, nor gifted with much confidence or self-esteem, not to mention a police force and a justice system—this is Virginia, after all, the state with the third highest death-penalty conviction rate in the nation—that doesn’t have any truck with bleeding-heart liberal presumptions like the one that presumes a person is innocent until proven guilty. No, these are tough guys (and girls) who believe in their innate ability to see through the lies and denials of bad guys, and their sacred duty to put them away, DNA be damned. Besides, they had those detailed confessions. So they came up with the most preposterous scenario of all: the Navy suspects had run into Ballard in the parking lot of the apartment complex, and conspired to all go in and rape Michelle Bosko. The confessions—at least of the four above—proved it. So three men were acquitted, but five of them—the actual killer, Ballard, and the four sailors who had confessed—were all convicted and sentenced to prison, most to languish there (from eight to thirteen years) until a reluctant Governor Kaine, yielding to growing publicity, granted the four conditional pardons that released them but did not overturn their convictions. They are still convicted felons and registered sex offenders.

Frontline’s web page has several auxiliary articles about this case that reveal some astonishing research. First, confessions are an ironclad element in most prosecutions, convincing not only the police but also prosecutors, judges, juries, and even the defendants’ lawyers of a suspect’s guilt. Especially when it contains details of the crime which an innocent defendant could not know, the confession remains an irrefutable demonstration of guilt in the minds of most people. Otherwise, why would an innocent person confess?

The answer is that it is surprisingly easy to get a person to confess after hours of grilling by bulldog cops like Robert Ford. Countless research projects have proved this, including one by law professor Richard Leo, who was interviewed on the Frontline program. In a 2009 paper (“False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, Implications,” J Ac Ad Psychiatry Law 37:332– 43, 2009) Leo details the personality types who are most susceptible to police pressure: they are often those “who are highly suggestible, (and) tend to have poor memories, high levels of anxiety, low self-esteem, and low assertiveness.” In addition they tend to be conflict avoiders, acquiescent, and most important in the Norfolk 4 case, “eager to please others, especially authority figures.” Conditions like sleep deprivation, fatigue, and drug and alcohol withdrawal add to their susceptibility. All or most of these conditions were met in the case of the Norfolk 4, including those conditions specifically designed to entrap the innocent: isolation, disempowerment, and the type of high stress that some individuals find almost unbearable. Add to this the type of psychological coercion that interrogators like Robert Ford specialize in (assuring the suspect that the only way out is to confess; alternately threatening and offering to provide leniency for cooperation; lying to the suspect about evidence, like the result of lie detector tests or the presence of confirming witnesses; and feeding information to the suspect to guide him in providing details of the crime he has supposedly committed). All of these are highly illegal procedures, but unless a videotape is made of the interrogation, the suspect has no way of proving that his confession was coerced or even guided. And the prosecution has that damning evidence, the confession, to cinch its case. Still, can even these techniques actually persuade an innocent person to sign a detailed confession of his guilt? Though most people believe they cannot, the Norfolk 4 case and numerous others prove that they can, and do, and have: as one researcher (Kassin) notes, “the pages of legal history are filled with stories of coerced-compliant confessions.”

One other macabre note to this Norfolk 4 case: Detective Robert Glenn Ford, the man who extracted (one might even say “authored”) those confessions, was subsequently charged with criminal conduct of his own: taking “bribes from criminals in exchange for getting them favorable treatment in court.” The Virginia Pilot noted that “on February 25, 2011, Robert Glenn Ford was sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison following his conviction in 2010 for extortion and lying to the FBI.” But not even this proof of corruption by Ford was enough to convince the legal system it had made a mistake. On March 2, even after Governor Tim Kaine’s pardon, Chief Judge Everett Martin dismissed petitions filed by Williams, Dick, and Wilson that their convictions be thrown out. The judge said that “evidence was lacking” to support the claim that Ford’s conviction should invalidate his questionable interrogations in the Norfolk 4 case. Nothing, it seems, can stop the wheels of the law from grinding onward, corruption and DNA proof be damned.

This is actually what I wanted to write about. Justice, in our vaunted system, is supposed to be impartial. The female image of Justice with a blindfold conveys the idea: justice is blind, i.e., blind to differences that might favor one group over another. But in actual practice, it is the administrators of alleged justice—police, prosecutors, judges and juries—who prove to be blind in the most pernicious sense. American jails offer mute testimony to this, filled as they are with the unfortunate discards that our society increasingly finds superfluous, countless people of color who are sentenced for drug crimes, for third-strike often-petty crimes, and as we now know, those like the Norfolk 4 who are coerced into plea bargains or coerced confessions with the promise of staying out of the death chamber. At the other end of the spectrum are those whom “justice” favors: police like Johannes Mehserle, actually filmed killing a black man on the Bart platform in Oakland, yet sentenced to a mere two years in prison; the countless high-rollers on Wall Street whose crime was global in bringing down the entire financial system, but who as yet remain unpunished; the lawyers advising the Bush administration (John Yoo et. al.), who literally legalized torture and war, yet are never charged; “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Dick Cheney, who got a slap on the wrist (30 months in prison, the sentence then commuted by Pres. Bush) for his role in lying and other crimes related to his outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

What this comes down to is that the enforcers of our great system—and I include cops on the beat, parole officers, and those “officers of the court,” the lawyers, prosecutors and judges; as well as the soldiers who kill for the empire in wars and “police actions” around the globe like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, et. al.—have a very clear assignment. It is not to protect the innocent, the poor, the helpless women and children we hear and see so much about on the TV programs designed to valorize and glorify the FBI, the cops, and our heroes in battle. It is to protect the life, liberty and property of the rich and the powerful. All other functions are in the nature of a “by the way.” This is easiest to see in foreign policy. The wars we have engaged in over the last half-century and more have been increasingly (perhaps always) aimed at places and countries where American business has vital property interests and investments. Since America is a global empire whose chief policy is “globalization,” the bases meant to protect these investments now number more than 1,000 (“The Worldwide Network of U.S. Military Bases, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5564 , counts 737 foreign bases in 63 countries, plus bases in continental U.S., covering millions of acres). Any nation that dares to arrogate to itself too much of its own natural or unnatural resources is quickly disabused of the notion, by force if necessary. The war in Iraq is only the latest large example of this procedure. Smaller actions in Guatemala, Honduras, and Haiti, and threats to Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Pakistan provide smaller instances. If we accept Proudhon’s notion that “property is theft” (we could also use deSade’s formulation, “Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation” or Saint Ambrose’s “the superfluous property which you hold you have stolen”), we can conclude that “law” enforcement (including the military) primarily serves to protect systems of organized theft and the enslavement of the masses. Looking at the history of supposed free democracies like our own and, more recently, Israel, we can see that nation states are organized around this simple principle: expropriate the land and resources from the indigenous (and necessarily weaker) people who live there, and then create powerful armies and constabularies to protect and extend the theft—both the original one, and the continuing subtler expropriations by those in power (usually those who got to steal the property earliest).

“Justice” can then be shaped in two ways: for the masses, systems of mass propaganda to persuade the plebes that all have the same opportunities to gain power and obtain justice; for the elites, welcome access to the halls of legislation creating the “justice” that allows them to increasingly consolidate their power and add to their property. Thus, both property and justice are cumulative, increasing almost like forces of nature. In the opposite direction, slavery is also cumulative, increasing in proportion as justice for the many diminishes. By slavery, here, I mean not only the original kind enslaving those from Africa; I mean also the kind of powerlessness that led the Norfolk 4 (and thousands of others like them) to serve years in prison, even though a rational assessment of the evidence would have freed them years before. I mean the loss of property by millions in the housing and retirement-fund debacle of 2008, at the same time that the financial perpetrators of that debacle made off with billions, much of it provided by the government (i.e. John Q. Taxpayer) without any accountability whatever, with, rather, more wealth than ever.

As for the solution to this systemic rapine, I don’t have much to offer. One thought that occurs, though, especially after witnessing the outrageous injustice in the Norfolk 4 case, is this: turn the tables. Give the rich (and their Republican lackeys) a choice, one reflective of the choice offered to coerced suspects: they can either share the burden of the debacle they helped create by paying far more taxes, or they can take their chances as targets of the revolutionary tumbrels even now rumbling towards them. It’s their choice (and isn’t free choice the value our system cherishes most?)

Lawrence DiStasi

Tomatoland

2011-07-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

One of the keys to eating these days is to strictly avoid knowing too much about where your food comes from. My last blog about modern pork-growing made that point, as have numerous books and documentaries like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the documentary Food, Inc., both of which show us the horrors of industrial meat growing. The latest addition to these nightmares is Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, by former editor of Gourmet Magazine, Barry Estabrook. The book has been showing up on radio shows recently, like NPR’s All Things Considered, and Terry Gross’ Fresh Air. I heard a segment on ATC the other day, and though we’ve all known for years that supermarket tomatoes, especially in winter, taste like wax, we didn’t know the whole gory story. Estabrook provides the details and it may make you swear off fresh tomatoes forever, except for those that come from your own garden.

That indeed, is how Estabrook starts out, reminding us that even in Vermont where he lives, he can take a patch of ground, put in a tomato seedling, and a couple of months later harvest something that tastes like a tomato. Then he notes that he recently asked Monica Ozores-Hampton, the chief guru for tomato farmers in Florida, what would happen if this same procedure were applied in Florida, and she simply replied “Nothing.” When Estabrook pressed her, she added:

“There would be nothing left of the seedling, not a trace. The soil here doesn't have any nitrogen, so it wouldn't have grown at all. The ground holds no moisture, so unless you watered regularly, the plant would certainly die. And, if it somehow survived, insect pests, bacteria, and fungal diseases would destroy it.” (quoted from excerpt of Tomatoland, (http://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137371975/how-industrial-farming-destroyed-the-tasty-tomato )
And yet, one-third of all the fresh tomatoes grown in the U.S. are grown in Florida. How could this be? As Estabrook himself says, given the soil conditions—Florida’s tomatoes are grown on pure sand, in an environment rife with tons of bacteria and other “pests” that if left alone (the lack of winter allows them to multiply like fleas) would make mince-meat of a tomato crop—you would have to be an “idiot” to try growing tomatoes commercially in Florida. So, again, why are tomatoes Florida’s most valuable—in money terms, that is, amounting to about $1.5 billion annually--crop?

That’s what Estabrook’s book is about. And the story he tells is as revolting as the parallel stories about the American way of growing pigs, or cattle, or chickens or corn or any other industrial crop. That’s because tomatoes in Florida have to be virtually manufactured. Estabrook uses another metaphor, to convey what Florida growers must do to overcome soil with no nutrients or water, and teeming with insects and fungi—total war:

Florida growers have to wage what amounts to total war against the elements. Forget the Hague Convention: We're talking about chemical, biological, and scorched-earth warfare against the forces of nature.
In truth, the metaphor of “total war against nature” pretty much describes all large-scale agriculture in the United States because that is what has happened in this country since World War II. Farming, small family farming that is, once the backbone of our great democracy (forgetting slavery and a few other problems), took its cue from the total war of WWII, and became a chemicalized, machine-dominated pursuit that only huge agribusinesses could compete in. The growing of tomatoes in Florida is a perfect type case (though if you look into wheat, soy or corn farming in the Midwest these days, you’d see equally revolting instances of the same paradigm.)

In the tomato case, though, it’s even more manufactured due to the soil. Because where the prairies of the Midwest, at one time, consisted of huge expanses of rich, virgin soil, Florida’s terrain is pretty much sand. To turn sand into a growing medium, you have to add a few things: water, for one. But of course, sand won’t hold water, so the growers adopt the technique of flooding entire areas with some of the abundant ground water in Florida. It’s called “seepage irrigation” and it involves pumping huge quantities of water into the canals and ditches that cross farmers’ fields, letting the water seep down into the impermeable hard pan that underlies the sand, and letting the water “seep outward, moistening the sand from below.” Only in Florida could such irrigation be done because it has the necessary ingredients: sand for soil and that impermeable hard pan to keep the water from draining even further down.

After water, the next problem with sand is its lack of nutrients. This is where U of Florida Prof. Ozores-Hampton comes in. Originally from Chile, her specialty is soil nutrients and “the optimal level at which fertilizers should be applied so as to maximize production, leaving as little surplus nitrogen and potassium in the soil as possible” (so as to minimize costly waste as well as complaints about polluting groundwater, lakes and rivers in Florida’s vulnerable habitats like the Everglades). And if you were wondering just how much and how many fertilizer and chemical nutrients are required to make sand yield tomatoes, Estabrook has an answer: a lot. Some comes from cover crops planted in the off-season (the normal growing season of spring to summer); some comes from the laboratory. But that’s only the beginning; there are also those pesky bacteria and fungi thriving in Florida’s year-round warmth and humidity to keep under control. In an interview Estabrook noted that Florida “applies more than 8 times the amount of pesticide and herbicides as does California, the next leading tomato grower.” He added:

“In order to get a successful crop of tomatoes, the official Florida handbook for tomato growers lists 110 different fungicides, pesticides and herbicides that can be applied to a tomato field over the course of the growing season. And many of those are what the Pesticide Action Network calls ‘bad actors’ — they’re kind of the worst of the worst in the agricultural chemical arsenal.”

So you’ve got chemicals for nutrients and chemicals to kill all the buggies that want to eat those nutrients, and then chemicals (ethylene gas) to fumigate the green, rock-hard tomatoes (growers have been breeding rock-hard tomatoes for years, at first so they could be picked by machine) that result so that they’ll turn orange or red at the proper time (they are required to keep for at least 10 days from the time they’re picked), and voila—picture-perfect, firm, tomatoes…that taste like plastic. But not to worry about the taste: as Estabrook explains, growers reason that they’re not paid to grow tasty tomatoes; they’re paid to grow tomatoes that will look good for as long as possible to taste-deaf American consumers.

All this, of course, says nothing about the temporary labor force required to pick all these tomatoes. Estabrook doesn’t mince words here. Describing the Mexicans and Guatemalans who make up this labor force, he says outright that it’s slavery:

“I came into this book chronicling a case of slavery in southwestern Florida that came to light in 2007 and 2008. And it was shocking. I’m not talking about near-slavery or slavery-like conditions. I’m talking about abject slavery. These were people who were bought and sold. These were people who were shackled in chains at night or locked in the back of produce trucks with no sanitary facilities all night. These were people who were forced to work whether they wanted to or not and if they didn't, they were beaten severely. If they tried to escape, they were either beaten worse or in some cases, they were killed. And they received little or no pay. It sounds like 1850. ... There have been seven [legal cases] in the last 10 or 15 years ... successfully brought to justice in Florida involving slavery. And 1,200 people have been freed. The U.S. Attorney for the district in Southern Florida claims that that just represents a tiny, tiny tip of an iceberg because it’s extraordinarily difficult to prosecute a modern-day slavery case.”

Of course, the growers have recently caved in to demands from a workers’ association (with prior pressure from Taco Bell, alarmed at the bad publicity slavery generates) to provide the workers with a penny more per pound picked, and even some tarps to provide the poor bastards with some shade. But it didn’t happen before a long, drawn-out fight. And with all the anti-immigrant laws being passed by states such as Arizona and Georgia, who knows how long it will last? Or how long before the need for these desperate migrant slaves disappears entirely—to succumb, like so many other jobs, to some more highly evolved machine.

Meantime, though, most Americans can continue to enjoy their year-round tomatoes, a continuing tribute, if only unconsciously, to the triumph of American technology over American taste—or American conscience.

Lawrence DiStasi

More Piggish Than Pigs

2011-07-01T18:18:00.000-07:00

My diet doesn’t include much pork—every week or two I will have a sausage and pepper sandwich, and perhaps once a year, eat pork roast on a holiday. But after this week, I will eat pork products no more: no sausage, no ham, no bacon, no pork chops, no salami or prosciutto. That’s because I’ve been jolted by more detailed information on what I’ve long known was a scandal, the corporatized factory-farming of pigs run by huge conglomerates like Smithfield Inc—the largest pork producer in the world. These are the folks that advertise their lovely sliced hams on the tube, evoking the recent past when pigs were raised by countless rural families (I used to see and hear a neighbor in suburban Connecticut slaughter his pig each year, a gory business but local, and known and understood by all as simply a family’s way of getting good clean meat for the year). The reality of today’s pork production, however, is far different and far more alarming.

The numbers alone are staggering: 27 million hogs killed in one year by Smithfield alone, equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of 32 of America’s largest cities. More astonishing is the quantity of pig excrement produced in these factory farms—because hogs produce three times more shit than a human being. As noted in Jeff Teitz’s, “Boss Hog,” Rolling Stone, December 2006:

The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums.
And what do the hog producers do with all this shit? It’s enough to make you swear off pork, in fact off all meat produced by America’s industrial farm system, forever. Typically, the excrement is stored in ponds euphemistically called “lagoons.” So many chemicals pour into these lagoons via the antibiotics and other “medicines” needed to keep pigs more or less free of the bacteria that thrive in their crowded quarters that the ponds become toxic to anything that falls into them (several fatal cases of workers and even truckers falling into these lagoons have been documented by investigators—see “Boss Hog,” noted above ). The runoff from the ponds is equally toxic to rivers and bays and their fish; at one point, Smithfield, under attack for fouling the waters in North Carolina so badly that it was fined millions by the EPA, decided to engage in what it called “pollution control.” And what was that? Here’s what Teitz observed:

Looking down from a plane, we watch as several of Smithfield’s farmers spray their hog shit straight up into the air as a fine mist: It looks like a public fountain. Lofted and atomized, the shit is blown clear of the company's property. People who breathe the shit-infused air suffer from bronchitis, asthma, heart palpitations, headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds and brain damage. In 1995, a woman downwind from a corporate hog farm in Olivia, Minnesota, called a poison control center and described her symptoms. “Ma'am,” the poison-control officer told her, “the only symptoms of hydrogen-sulfide poisoning you're not experiencing are seizures, convulsions and death. Leave the area immediately.”
Never ones to waste anything, Smithfield’s operators then used the shit spray to fertilize nearby hay fields, supplying the feed to both the hogs and other farm animals. A perfect “made-in-America” solution, except for the fact that this nitrate-laden hay made livestock sick. But then, every solution has a down side. A few sick cattle, a few asthmatic humans breathing shit in their air, are nothing compared to the ingeniously productive farm methods of corporate America (Smithfield’s sales for the year ending in April 2010 were over $11 billion, with 48,000 employees).

As to the animals themselves, well they’re only pigs after all. Housing them—the artificially-inseminated females, that is, producing more little piggies for Smithfield—in fiendish devices called “gestation crates,” is no more than they deserve. And what are gestation crates? They’re cramped metal cages “too small to turn around in, devoid of sunlight, straw, air or earth.” The sows, which produce and nurse five to eight litters in their four years of existence, literally go mad from their confinement, biting the metal bars till they bleed, with immune systems completely broken down. When these conditions were publicized, Smithfield in 2007 (and several other hog producers) vowed to eliminate the crates from their facilities. But then, in 2009, Smithfield reneged on its commitment, saying the transition to more humane pens would be too costly. In 2010, yet another investigation, this time by the Humane Society, produced a report, with video, of the same inhumane conditions at Smithfield facilities. The video and excerpts from its report can be seen on http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Smithfield_Foods, but be careful: it will break your heart if it doesn’t nauseate you first.

The latest bit of news about the nation’s hog farming, this time from an operation in Iowa, the state with the highest hog production in the country, asked a new question: “Animal Cruelty: Could a Barbaric Pig-Handling Video Hurt Major Grocery Chains?” Posted on Time.com, and on Yahoo News on June 30, 2011, the new report tells of a “horrific undercover video” shot by the group Mercy For Animals. It showed the brutal treatment of hogs as they are confined (tails docked or “cut off”; pigs casually tossed across pens by workers; sickly ones slammed head-first on the floor to eliminate them) and slaughtered. To record his findings, the investigator got himself hired and worked undercover for several months (several states have now banned such recording of industrial operations by these bleeding hearts). And what the article wonders is, will this cause consumers to boycott pork at the big chain stores specifically supplied by this producer: Kroger’s, Safeway, Costco and Hy-Vee?

One can only hope this is the least that results. As for me, I repeat my vow: refusal to eat any pork product whatever, perhaps any meat product either. Because what has been revealed about pigs is no aberration on America’s vile torture-farms. Rather it is the rule. Efficiency and profit are all that matters. And the worst part is that we are exporting that “efficiency” and “profit-making” and “torture” all over the world. One of the expedients used by Smithfield in the face of all the negative publicity they’ve been getting is to buy up huge facilities in Poland and Rumania to transfer their operations there.

And if those operations succumb to public revulsion as well? Perhaps a special place in hell—with a nice hot suite of offices for those in charge, including visitor facilities for the politicians who enable them—could be fitted out.

Lawrence DiStasi

American Exceptionalism

2011-06-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

My Country ‘Tis of Thee
Sweet Land of Liberty
Land where the food is fried
And where the poor have cried
When those in war have died
Let us drink and sing
And have our I-phones ring
As we remember days
When monarchies blazed
Feudalism was the thing
And all hailed the king

I have forgotten exactly which event I was recently watching on TV, although it was probably a sporting event, but I became annoyed as some female performer sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” I do not know exactly when this song first raised my dander, but I was in my teens. The song has no place in our republic, no matter what the words say. The music is a note-for-note copy of Britain’s “God Save the King/Queen.” Whatever words we add or delete, it subtly promotes the principle of personal sovereignty in our republic where the best defining difference of America is that we have no personal sovereign. We have no king or queen. We need no musical vestige of kings and queens. We are exceptional in that regard. We swear no personal oath of loyalty; our oath is only to support and defend the constitution.

I have chosen to deal with “American Exceptionalism” mainly because it has been so badly distorted. Even neocons have used the concept to justify the most oppressive and undemocratic behaviors of government. Loosely linked to “Manifest Destiny,” it excuses wars of choice as a divine right. It pardons military expansionism as an expression of “exceptionalism.” Neocons saw this as justification enough to invade Iraq. One major reason that our nation was formed was specifically to be unburdened of royal wars where the nobility used the people to build up personal wealth and power. Fealty to the king, a personal sovereign, was paramount in that setting. Subjects literally owed their lives to the king and by his whim might die. License to kill is not in the original concept of American exceptionalism by Alexis de Tocqueville who described it in the 1700s. Crowds screaming “We’re Number One” do not promote our exceptionalism. Nor is it enhanced by blithe and ignorant statements that indicate that if it is American, whether healthcare, automobiles or restaurants, it is better than any other in the world. By most objective measures, we are high in the grand ordering of nations, but we are not first in everything and that is not how we are exceptional. We are exceptional in that we are fortunate to live in a nation where social class is an outcome and not a birthright. Most recently, that aspect is being strained and we have fallen to 20th in the world in social mobility. American social mobility is largely determined by personal economic success. While wages for most Americans have declined over the past decade, income for senior executives has increased dramatically and the middleclass has shrunk. The mechanism for mobility is still there, but weakened by shipping jobs overseas and a new emphasis on corporations as people instead of the more traditional American support of individual rights and freedoms of real breathing people. That diminishes another value: Fair Play. If fair play can be re-incorporated into our workplace, the economics might follow. Until then, individuals, unlike major corporations will not be bailed out.

Our brief but rich history is branded by a stark line of demarcation between our ideals of a “shining city on a hill,” and our use of raw power to get our way in the world. While both elements have been present from the beginning, we must not fool ourselves into believing that because we have high ideals that having them is, in itself, a balance for sometimes despicable behavior. The balance can only come if we systematically review our history with clear eyes. Only then will our efforts to right our wrongs succeed by promoting truth rather than revising our history. Even the plucky Pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay Colony moved quickly from accepting food from Native Americans to avoid starvation to a bloody massacre of the Pequots within months. And no, Paul Revere did not, some 150 years later warn the British by ringing bells and telling them not to take our guns. I mention Sarah Palin’s hysterical account of history only to remind the reader that revisionism can take many forms, but regardless of the precise revision or the motivation, we must begin with the facts if we are ever going to make the changes and adjustments we need as a nation. Revisions retard progress. Whitewash needs removal before we can fix our imperfections.

Let me sample times when we have not lived up to our ideals: Beginning with the callous disregard of Native Americans, then Slavery and the Civil War itself, we departed from our ideals as we did more recently through 1942 Executive Order 9066 that sent Japanese and Italian Americans to concentration camps that we called “relocation camps,” while we confiscated their real estate and personal property. We departed from our ideals by launching an unprovoked attack on Iraq; then Abu Ghraib and the cover-up. Most recently, we have attacked labor unions and torn their right to represent labor from their hands and denied them the same economic and political rights that corporations enjoy. This has caused us to depart from our ideals of fair play and has resulted in scapegoating instead of problem solving. It is threatening the very essence of who we are when dignity and basic needs like food and healthcare become economic weapons of political warfare. Thirty percent of our children are below the poverty line and are underfed and under educated. The religious freedom we cherish has sometimes become a club or litmus test against non-believers or practitioners of different faiths. Mormons were shunned and harassed and yet later, they themselves conducted the Mountain Meadows massacre. A nation founded upon a model melting pot has sometimes blamed immigrants for economic ills. Even today, Georgia has instituted draconian measures so severe that migrant workers are fearful to work in Georgia and attempts to get field hands from parolees have failed despite unemployment rates exceeding 25% for those on probation from jail.

Is America “Exceptional?” Yes, but with egregious examples of failing to live up to our ideals. We are a nation with both high ideals and high energy and our strength comes from both. Lofty ideals with no desire to achieve them would be meaningless, or worse. Reckless application of energy without ideals is tyranny and chaos. Only we can change the outcome. We need no benevolent king. We need to seek out the truth so that we can pursue our ideals and eliminate the fear that divides us. It is that fear that becomes “weaponized” to make enemies of Mexicans or gays or Muslims or whatever the next target will be. Responsible high profile people like John McCain who essentially accused Mexican migrants of starting the horrific wildfires in Arizona add to the problem. Revision of history or willful distortion of current events strips us of our exceptionalism and makes us ordinary indeed. Even worse, it makes us look the wrong way to solve a problem. Allow me to put this into another context. Let’s say that your car is getting poor mileage and that you take it to be fixed claiming that somebody was stealing fuel from your tank because you are suspicious of your new neighbor. The quick solution would be to install a locking gas-cap, but what if the real problem was fouled spark plugs. The gas-cap might give you temporary comfort, but your mileage would not improve. Or you build a wall on your southern border, but you still can’t get US labor to take your low paying jobs no matter how much you blame immigrants for taking jobs that nobody else wants. Successful problem solving requires an accurate definition of the problem. If you alter history, you may feel better, but you still will not solve the problem.

Maybe we should consider the notion promoted in the 1960s to challenge authority; the media and politicians who use hatred and our human weaknesses for expedient gains. Let us use our energy to both pursue our ideals and to change our future by knowing and understanding our history. We are not feudal vassals of some distant king. We are free and can exercise that freedom on our own to pursue truth and truly become exceptional. Fear stirs emotions, but solves no problems. Ignorance of history may provide fairy tales to tell our children of the honor and glory of our ideals, but it whitewashes the problems that need to be solved. Knowledge and hard work can solve problems and help us reach our ideals. I recently received an email from a friend that purported to be a shameful account of presidential behavior. I quickly referred to “Fact-Check.” It was a despicable fraud as are so many including the recent viral video of Janice Hahn. Be free and skeptical.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
25 June 2011

Joko

2011-06-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

Her name was Charlotte Beck, she was trained at Oberlin as a pianist, she came to Zen practice in her forties, and after she was authorized to teach she set out in her own, uniquely American direction. Mainly, she eschewed most formalities and titles (she stopped shaving her head and wore plain skirts and tops rather than robes, though she kept her Dharma name, “Joko”) and emphasized not “enlightenment experiences” but coming to grips with daily life and its problems. If a student told her about an ‘experience,’ she would say, “Yeah, that’s O.K. Don’t hold onto it. And how are you getting along with your mother?”

I started to study with her in the 80s and sat several “sesshins” with her, one at her zendo in San Diego, most in Oakland. Though she eschewed formality (her second book is titled Nothing Special), she was nevertheless a formidable figure: big-boned, plainspoken, imposing, authoritative. Too, she urged one to be “meticulous” in everything concerned with practice: meticulous attention to one’s thoughts and emotions (she grouped them together as “emotion/thoughts”), meticulous attention to the physical care of one’s sitting space, to whatever job one was given. She never sugar-coated what we were doing or what life was about, often saying without ornament that it was hopeless, or simply, a mess. Once she compared our condition to someone falling from a tall building: ‘Are you going to focus on what the scenery is like or what your real situation is?’ In a recent interview, she said that the important thing in Zen practice is “Learning how to deal with one’s personal, egotistic self. That’s the work. Very, very difficult.” In one of her books she wrote, “Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.” She also told me once, after a betrayal, that there is no one we can truly trust (in this she was following Huang-Po, one of the great Zen masters, who told his students, “There is nothing on which you can rely.”)

She knew this first hand. Her own life included disappointments and betrayals, not least her discovery that her own teacher, Maezumi Roshi of Los Angeles, could not control his drinking or his sexual attraction to her daughter. Her break with the traditional style of zen teaching came partly as a result of this. She determined that her style of zen would not sweep such ‘mundane’ concerns under the rug, but would place them at the center of practice. What resulted was one of the most influential modes of teaching and expression (her genius for making Buddhism accessible and comprehensible to westerners was uparalleled) in American Zen. For Joko, Zen was not some mystical, baffling presentation of esoteric stories or doctrines aimed at transcendence. It focused on the problems of everyday life—but as meditated upon in the very particular, silent environment of zen training—and with the guidance of an experienced teacher.

Of the many brilliant phrases I heard her utter, one sticks in my mind. I’m not sure what her subject was—perhaps something about being judgmental, or our penchant for putting ourselves above others—but at some point she said this:

“Everyone is trying their best.”

It’s as simple yet profound a sentence as one can imagine, the insight that, in essence, we are all always trying to do the best we can. This includes those who shine in a task, as well as those who fail miserably. It includes those who have endless talent as well as those who are hopelessly inept. It includes those who work hard and honestly as well as those who slough off and cheat; those who sacrifice themselves on behalf of others, and those who scheme to secure their own advantage; those who push through to victory and those who give up too early. It does not leave out the lame, the halt, the criminal, the saintly, the deluded and the visionary, the luminary and the suicide. It is, really, the ultimate expression of compassion and, typical of Joko Beck, without a shred of fake optimism or sugary solace in a divine plan. It is simply a profound insight into the fact that everyone is different, everyone is differently endowed, and that everyone is conditioned by whatever set of circumstances prevail at a given moment. In such a world view, the outcome of any situation is simply what conditions make it, with no grounds for anyone taking credit over anyone else. Taking credit, or assigning blame are the functions of that “personal, egotistic self” one has to study and know, and see for the self-coddling illusions they are. By contrast, comprehending that everyone, without exception, is trying their best is to see with the eye of compassion upon which Buddhism, or any spiritual tradition is founded. It is, I would suggest, the arrow pointing towards true wisdom.

Lest anyone think that because she spoke such words, Joko Beck was proof against the frailties of the egotistic self, it should also be noted that her retirement led to a public conflict with those she left in charge of her Zen Center, and a formal break with them. The letter she wrote on that occasion is living proof that she was not exempt from the mess of “emotion/thought.” But of course, she never claimed to be. She was “nothing special,” a frail and courageous human being who was, like all the rest of us, simply “trying her best.”

Joke Beck died, at age 94, on June 15. Though she would have scorned any notion of the ‘special’ place she occupied in American Zen, the truth is, she did. She will be missed.

Lawrence DiStasi

Should Government be Run as a Business?

2011-06-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

Some people think that if government were run more like a business that would be a good thing. One strong advocate of that idea was Ross Perot, who despite having no political experience, became a serious contender in the 1992 presidential race. In fact, he had a slight lead in the polls over Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush before withdrawing from the race. Although Perot reentered the race, that temperamental blunder and his dubious choice of a running mate, doomed his chances. Even so he took 20% of the vote as a candidate on the short lived Reform Party.

Perot’s popularity was fueled by a discontent with the two parties on the part of many Americans who held a low opinion of politicians and politics as usual. This feeling was further fueled by Ralph Nader who made the absurd claim that there was little real difference between Republicans and Democrats, even though the two parties were miles apart on most issues. There was this idea that someone like Perot who was highly successful in the business world and independent of both parties could roll up his sleeves and fix the ills of government the way a mechanic could fix a car. That you could simply apply the same methods used in the company board room and use them in cabinet meetings and dealings with foreign countries. It was an appealing notion that difficult problems could be solved by resolutely attacking them head on.

Donald Trump briefly used this same appeal to tap into the anger of Tea Party voters who know little of history and have a distorted view of what the real political problems are. Arnold Schwartzenegger also had this aura of the successful outsider who could come in and make government work because he had great success both as a body builder and as an actor. Did voters think that if you have a record of success that running a government is somehow not all that different?

More recently, in California you had Ebay CEO, Meg Whitman trying to convince voters that her corporate experience was more valuable than Jerry Brown’s long record in politics; including having prior success in the office he was running for. And there was Carly Fiorino who had less than a sparking resume as CEO of Hewlett-Packard trying to convince voters that despite outsourcing thousands of American jobs to other countries she knew just how to create all sorts of good jobs here in California.
Maybe if we look into the past at all of the great American Presidents who were also successful businessmen we could get a better appreciation of how these business world skills can transfer over into good government. So, I did a little research on Wikipedia and this is what I found. Out of the 44 American Presidents 26 were listed as lawyers, 10 had served in the military, 5 were farmers and 5 were teachers and 4 had prior business experience. Some were lawyers who had also served in the military and Thomas Jefferson was listed as writer, inventor, lawyer, architect, farmer and plantation owner. The only two presidents who are listed primarily as businessmen are George Bush senior and George W. Bush, who were both in the oil business. Both were born into wealth and neither built a successful business from the ground up. The other two are Harry Truman who was a farmer and modestly successful haberdasher. Calvin Coolidge was a lawyer who was also a bank president. Coolidge took the position that the government would run just fine by itself if he went off to his farm. This may explain why his successor, Herbert Hoover, an engineer and investor, inherited a disaster called the Great Depression. One major advantage Franklin D. Roosevelt had over Barack Obama in a similar position was that he didn’t have a Republican minority blocking every attempt at improving the economy by excessive use of the filibuster.

Now I’m not saying that someone who has been a big success in the business world couldn’t be a good President, but it hasn’t happened yet. My main argument here is that government should not be run like a business. It should be run efficiently and effectively, and cut waste and fraud, but the goal is not to make as much money as possible. It is not to grow the company and sell a service or product. Government should be run for the purpose of providing a better life for all its citizens, to provide opportunity and justice for all. It should protect its people from foreign threats and be a democratic example for others to follow. None of these things have anything inherently to do with running a business for profit.

Here is where I believe the philosophical difference stands. Ever since Ronald Reagan, the NeoCons, who have now become the mainstream of the Republican Party, have acted as though the government should be run for the benefit of business. That means outsourcing jobs, salaried positions where employees work 65 hours a week and get paid for 40, breaking unions, eliminating regulations for big business, maintaining a military far beyond our means and rigging the tax code in favor of the very rich and the corporations and privatizing schools, prisons, health care, social security and everything else they can take control of and make a dollar on.

it’s the Democrat’s job to expose their true agenda and stop them.

David Silva

Wieners, State Murder and Morality

2011-06-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to ignore these days: sex scandals by the powerful (Congressman Anthony Wiener, Presidential candidate John Edwards, French Director of the IMF Dominque Strauss-Kahn, ex-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, ex-NY Governor Eliot Spitzer, and dozens of lesser lights) provide us with one amusing spectacle of self-immolation after another (isn’t it always amusing to see the fall of a narcissist?) Less amusing and more ominous are the increasing episodes of powerful leaders turning their military might on their own people: the government-directed thugs in Egypt’s Tahrir Square now seem like choirboys compared to the savagery unleashed on protestors by “leaders” in Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Syria and nearly everywhere else these days, where those in power seem quite willing to murder their own people to keep it. Indeed, it seems that the major use of the military these days is to exterminate internal dissent: it happens no less frequently in Israel (murderous attacks on the Palestinians whom Israel, as an occupying power, is by law bound to protect) than in Iran; with the related threat clear in every so-called “advanced democracy” to spy on and cripple any form of even consideration about dissent that may raise its head (“domestic terrorist” is the appellation given in the U.S.).

What this leads me to (aside from dreaming about actual revolution) is speculation about what drives apparently sane men (and sometimes women) to the kind of immorality, or amorality, that is so conspicuous these days: sexual misconduct suitable to teenagers, or the casual murder of the innocent. The two seem related, if only to the extent that, as the old saw goes, Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Indeed, a recent piece on the corruption inherent in sexual misadventures by politicians puts it this way: politics “selects for people with risk-taking behavior and a high degree of self-regard” (Katherine Zernike, NY Times, 6/12/11). So you get people in power who are narcissistic juveniles deluded into thinking they’re gods. Some might even call them psychopaths.

Is this the answer, then? That the people who, as leaders, commit stupid and terrible acts, are self-selected psychos?

Probably many would like to believe that; because what it implies is that we, the normal ones, the moral ones, aren’t prone to such behavior. We would never do such things. It was to test this thesis that Philip Zimbardo, in 1975, embarked on a now-famous study known as The Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo has written about this in a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House: 2007). The conclusions are stunning and quite discomfiting. What the study (graduate students were told they were to engage in an experiment about prisons; some were chosen as “guards” while others were chosen as “prisoners”) found was that it was startlingly easy to elicit violent and aggressive behavior by the “guards,” even though they had been selected for stability and told they were engaged in an experiment with fellow students. Once they were put in the role of “guards,” that is, the students began to act like authoritarian and even sadistic controllers of those subject to their whims. The “prisoners,” by contrast, in the role of the controlled, began to break down with crying, depression and disorganized thinking, to the point that by the fifth day of the experiment all asked to be released from the game and the experiment had to be stopped ahead of time.

What this indicates is that even playing roles for which they had no previous experience led apparently decent people to become torturers and bullies. As one summary of the study put it:

The Zimbardo prison study, like the Milgram study, was valuable in showing how easily ordinary people could slip into a brutal and aggressive pattern of behavior, especially if it was approved by an authority. (from Psychology: An Introduction, by Russsell A. Dewey, PhD, (http://www.intropsych.com/ch15_social/zimbardos_prison_study.html ). (NB: the earlier Milgram study demonstrated that normal subjects could be easily persuaded to punish “learners” with what they thought were powerful electric shocks, if they were urged to by authorities).
This study (and previous studies, including Hannah Arendt’s examination of the Nazis who committed horrifying acts in the guise of “just doing my job,” which led her to coin the term, “the banality of evil”) thus means that, to a degree yet to be determined, most humans are quite capable of immoral or amoral behavior. More, it means that, to some extent, humans conform to the role they are given to play. The role itself—be it prison guard or U.S. Congressman or head of state—determines how those in that role behave. Those who manage to get themselves into a position of power, that is, often find that the immunity from punishment the position confers leads them to behaviors that they might otherwise contemplate with disgust or condemnation. We can see this on a smaller scale in our own lives: if we think we can get away with it, we might run a red light or cheat on our taxes. If we are authorized to exercise power over others, even over students (as teachers) or our own children (as parents), we might become authoritarian and punitive to a degree that shocks us in retrospect. Of course, this is always justified as being “for your own good.”

If we agree, then, that humans are capable of brutal or evil actions, the question becomes why? Are we as humans naturally inclined to behave badly and simply await the right opportunity? Or are we naturally inclined to be good and moral, and get drawn to brutal behavior by circumstances—either the role we are given, or the deprivation we are desperate to move out of? And more deeply, do we have a choice, i.e. are we equipped with free will to choose one or the other? Or are we driven like automatons by forces deeper than we know? Did Anthony Wiener, to get specific, have control over his computer finger in sending out his silly photograph? Or was he compelled to take that idiotic risk (what could possibly be the payoff for such a risk?) by internal or external forces beyond his conscious control? And what about the monsters like Syrian President Assad, who has killed thousands of his own people? Or the King of Bahrain who brought in Saudi forces to kill his own people for seeking a better life? Or any of a million others we could name?

Clearly, conservatives, especially religious ones in the Christian tradition, believe (or claim to believe) in strict personal responsibility. If you commit any act that “breaks the law,” you are guilty and deserve punishment. Behind this view lurks the doctrine of “original sin,” first promoted by St. Augustine, that humans are tainted at birth because of the original sin of Adam in disobeying God in the Garden of Eden. Hence, humans are born depraved and require strict laws and punishments to back up God-dispensed or government-created laws in order to be “good.” Jews, while rejecting this original-sin doctrine, subscribe to a somewhat related concept: that humans in this world are imperfect, and therefore prone to commit sins for which they must atone. The important point about both these views, and about most social/religious views in general, is that humans have free will and can choose either good or evil. Humans are inclined, by nature (or Satan), to sin, and it is through the appeal to Christ or God or the moral law (Torah, Ten Commandments, Koran etc.) that these inclinations can be controlled and turned to good.

By contrast, there are more recent traditions (starting with Jean Jacques Rosseau, who specifically rejected the doctrine of innate human depravity) which see humans as basically good, with the evils of society forcing them to behave badly. Most progressive or reformist political theories begin with this general idea, and therefore seek to compensate for societal inequality by instituting laws and programs that give the poor and oppressed a better chance at advancement. Social security, Medicare, unemployment compensation and progressive tax policies are all designed to this end. The root idea is that all people can thrive if the “unfair” advantages of birth are mitigated and all are given a level playing field on which to operate.

Aside from the rightness or wrongness of such policies, the issue here is whether or not the root ideas are sound. Do humans actually have control over their own destinies? Does free will actually exist? Because if not, if humans are in fact driven by forces beyond or beneath their conscious control (the “conscious self”), then the recent questioning of the very idea of free will and the social/legal system resulting from it (and morality itself), becomes a serious issue. Thomas Metzinger, in The Ego Tunnel (Basic Books: 2009), has framed this question quite clearly:

Free will does not exist in our minds alone—it is also a social institution. The assumption that something like free agency exists, and the fact that we treat one another as autonomous agents, are concepts fundamental to our legal system and the rules governing our societies—rules built on the notions of responsibility, accountability, and guilt…If one day we must tell an entirely different story about what human will is or is not, this will affect our societies in an unprecedented way. For instance, if accountability and responsibility do not really exist, it is meaningless to punish people (as opposed to rehabilitating them) for something they ultimately could not have avoided doing. (Metzinger, p. 127)
What Metzinger is referring to is a host of neuroscientific discoveries that have begun to cast serious doubt (as the Buddha did two millennia ago) on the reality of what we feel and call “the conscious self.” We feel ourselves, that is, as autonomous beings with control of our actions; we feel ourselves (and everyone else) to be the conscious agents of our own actions. But what neuroscience has increasingly found is that we feel this only because the subconscious or unconscious precursors to our actions in the brain are invisible to us. This is why we have the absolutely certain feeling that our minds initiate actions that our bodies carry out. Since we are blind, that is, to the model we have created of ourselves and our bodies, we are correspondingly blind to the workings of our own brains. This is proved in countless experiments which show that injuries to certain parts of the brain (often via stroke) impel people to do things which surprise their conscious selves, and importantly, cause that “self” to make up preposterous stories to account for those baffling actions or perceptions. It is also proved in research into what are called “canonical neurons,” which demonstrate that our perception is not objective in the sense that we simply see an apple or a cup; we actually perceive such objects as “what I could do with (them).” Perception and action are not separate, that is; perception automatically includes a program or inclination for a possible interaction with the object perceived: A desire or intention to grasp or eat it is already included in seeing an apple. Metzinger then concludes:

When modern neuroscience discovers the sufficient neural correlates for our willing, desiring, deliberating, and executing an action…it will become clear that the actual causes of our actions, desires and intentions often have very little to do with what the conscious self tells us. From a scientific, third person perspective, our inner experience of strong autonomy may look increasingly like what it has been all along: an appearance only…(p. 131)

What will we do then? Will we still condemn the Wieners in the same way? Will we continue to lock people up for their “willful” actions? Continue to declare opposing leaders monstrous aberrations of humanity? Continue to set ourselves off as separate and different (and, of course, superior) from such ‘sinners’? No doubt many will. For others, though, it will appear critical that the moral arbiters of society be shaken from their long hallucination that some supreme being has handed down fixed laws for all to follow, and that those laws equate with something called “justice.” We will all have to either accept the fact that life or evolution or whatever power we name is no respecter of human imaginings about its meaning, or the fact that our laws and strictures and goals are little more than vain desires for humans (especially other humans) to be far more, and far better than they apparently are. Either one of which might deliver more of what we pretend to want (justice, tolerance, compassion) than what we have now.

Lawrence DiStasi

Death Cheers

2011-05-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

One of the nauseating aspects of being American is what occurs when the military or a sporting team in some form or other registers a triumph. The killing of Osama bin Laden represents this phenomenon perfectly. Though the president did not gloat when he made his late night announcement on Sunday, he left no doubt that “justice had been done,” and that the “world would be a safer place” without this monster. The clear implication, from him and from his chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, was that there had been a “fierce firefight” in the course of which the evil terrorist had been slain. Brennan also asserted that Osama had used his wives as human shields (see, he’s just a coward; actual words: “I think it really just speaks to how false his narrative has been over the years.”), a claim the administration later backed away from. Only later still did we discover the details, and they are not pretty.

First we learned that far from the evidence being made public—the body in question, or even photos of the dead leader—it was gone: the corpse had been disposed of at sea (what, Osama the sailor?) and there would be no photos either. Osama bin Laden had been shot in the eye and apparently his dead head was not suitable for primetime viewing—the children, you know. Then we were told that fiercely opposing the notoriously-efficient 25-man death squad of Navy Seals were only two (2) men besides Osama—his courier and the courier’s brother, with one or both families—and one or two women or wives, in addition to Osama’s children. So the “courage and bravery of these men who risked their lives” was not so conspicuous after all. They had not assaulted an enemy encampment bristling with murderous guards, but a domestic scene of about 7 or 8 people. Their usual night raids in Afghanistan and Iraq probably posed far more dangers for this assassination squad on a nightly basis than this, their most conspicuous mission.

Now we learn from White House press secretary Jay Carney, in response to questions from reporters, that the great emblem of global evil was NOT ARMED. He had no weapon with which to defend himself, but of course the press secretary was quick to add that a woman had attacked the brave Navy Seals, who shot her in the leg. Then Osama’s wife apparently threatened them, or made threatening gestures, and they then shot Osama bin Laden in the head—through the eye. Others, like Brennan, have said bin Laden resisted, though how is not clear. No matter: Navy Seals armed to the teeth and coated in body armor apparently feared for their lives and quite reasonably had to shoot him. (We will no doubt hear the inside story from one of them, after the narrative has been duly ghost-written to best display their heroism).

None of this makes sense, except in this way. Though the Attorney General (Tuesday News Hour) insisted that the instructions were to take bin Laden into custody, or if necessary, to kill him, the clear implication of all we’ve learned so far indicates that the kill order was primary. These guys were sent to kill Osama bin Laden, and there was little or no chance that he would be brought back to the United States alive to stand trial. And so, what the President crowed was “justice” and what pundits in every forum have continued to proclaim as “justice” was really a targeted assassination. The evil bin Laden received justice by assassination, American justice in this case consisting of a bullet in the head, and a dump in the ocean.

I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t strike me as justice to cheer about. What it reminds us of is the kind of “justice” the Israelis have perfected: targeted assassination. They decide that some Palestinian is a “terrorist” who deserves to die, and then send in a team or a rocket to act as judge, jury, and executioner, collateral damage be damned. We seem to have learned well from them; for justice in the bin Laden case was streamlined to the killing of someone you prefer not to bring to trial for fear that a courtroom is far less efficient and far more uncertain. And when we reflect that even Saddam Hussein, that prior emblem of evil (isn’t is marvelous how the mantle of ultimate evil can be shifted from one postered head to another, and back, without so much as a by your leave?), was captured and brought to trial, we have to wonder why Osama was not shot in the leg or the arm or simply overpowered (he had no weapon!) rather than being shot in the eye (one wonders about the caliber of the weapon that shot that eye, but with the rapid-fire cannons these guys carry, the resulting wound was no doubt ample).

The logical answer is that, like many other American operations designed to rally us round the flag, this was a revenge killing. Americans, as after Pearl Harbor when revenge took the form of nuclear destruction, have been thirsting for revenge, but were diverted to Saddam and Iraq right after 9/11. What remained, though, after flattening both, was that emotional need to “get” the bastard who allegedly masterminded 9/11. When the opportunity presented itself, the current president, like all politicians with an eye to poll numbers, took the cue from his Israeli partners: assassinate the bastard. The rubes will cheer and shout “USA USA,” which indeed they did. And the pundits will pontificate about “justice” being done, and the people will be satisfied with being, once again, NUMBER ONE. As if killing people in cold blood is equivalent to some Olympic sport. All that’s lacking is a tradition that used to prevail among tribal societies, where you not only dance over the killing of your enemy, but eat his significant organs. Perhaps soon, that great atavism will return among us as well. Meantime we can content ourselves with a “courageous” brain explosion via a bullet to the eye (is there symbolism here? i.e., that evil eye can no longer fix us in its sights), and the feeding of the corpse to our ravenous surrogates, the fishes.

Lawrence DiStasi

The End of Empire

2011-04-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

Various observers, including myself, have been speculating for years on the resemblance of America in the 21st century to the Rome described by Gibbon in The Fall of the Roman Empire. Especially after George W. led the country into a useless and illegal war in Iraq, all of it on America’s already overdrawn credit card, and the madness emanating from the fundamentalist revival of recent years, the comparison has become all but inevitable, if always couched in the future tense. Now, however, the IMF has dropped what Brett Arends has called a “bombshell.” Its latest economic forecast of economic activity has predicted that “China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016—just five years from now” (Brett Arends, “IMF Bombshell: Age of America Nears End,” Yahoo Finance, April 26, 2011, online). That’s five (5) years from now, folks. The figures are based on something called “purchasing power parities,” a figure Arends calls the true figure for comparison because it “compares what people earn and spend in real terms in their domestic economies.” As Arends explains the figures, by 2016, China’s economy is predicted to expand from $11.2 trillion this year to “$19 trillion in 2016.” The U.S economy will also rise, but at a slower rate: from “$15.2 trillion this year to $18.8 trillion” in 2016. America’s share of world output would thus shrink to 17.7% while China’s will rise to 18% and beyond. For a comparison, Arends startles us with this: 10 years ago the U.S. economy was three times the size of China’s.
Now there are lots of ramifications to this prediction, but one cited by Arends has great relevance to our current mess. He quotes Ralph Gomory, a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School, comparing China’s “state-guided capitalism,” with our “free” one:
What we have seen, he [Gomory] said, is “a massive shift in capability from the U.S. to China. What we have done is traded jobs for profit. The jobs have moved to China. The capability erodes in the U.S. and grows in China. That's very destructive. That is a big reason why the U.S. is becoming more and more polarized between a small, very rich class and an eroding middle class. The people who get the profits are very different from the people who lost the wages.” (Emphasis mine.)
I think that tells us a lot of what we need to know. Apparently, Chinese businessmen are not allowed to sell their own country down the river; quite the opposite, in fact. Chinese policy has emphasized “national expansion and power,” while the U.S. has allowed its corporate giants and speculating Wall Steeters to outsource the world’s premier production enterprise along with the American jobs that once went with it—enriching themselves, of course, via lower costs, but bankrupting the nation.

Again, the ramifications for what Arends calls a “paradigm shift” are massive, not just regarding who becomes the world’s military hegemon (we can hardly afford the wars we’re already stuck in, not to mention the 700 or so military bases we maintain), but especially with respect to the value of the dollar, because when it is replaced as the world’s reserve currency, no one can predict what will happen. It’s a fair bet, though, that it won’t be good—which is probably why gold has been shooting up in value recently.

For the average American, though, this is going to be strange. Most of us have had the “good” fortune to grow up in an America that essentially ruled the world. Its way of life and opportunities for average people were said to be the standard by which the world measured such things. Indeed, it was only a short time ago that the Bushies were prating on about our responsibilities, military and didactic, as the “only remaining Superpower.” To suddenly be living in a nation which has lost its mojo (the U.S. credit rating has already been downgraded by Standard & Poor’s) and has to ask or petition rather than command is going to feel like a brave new world, indeed. Oh there will still be cheerleaders and politicians who will insist it ain’t so, or who will blame it on the poor. But the odor of change is already blowin’ in the wind and it won’t be the kind Bob Dylan was singing about.

Lawrence DiStasi

Conservative Morality

2011-04-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

We have seen in grim detail recently just what the Republican program for “solving” our deficit problem is going to entail when Representative Paul Ryan (now Chair of the House Budget Committee) presented his plan for cutting nearly $6 trillion from the deficit. It involved big cuts in spending for social programs—especially Medicare and Medicaid—and NO raising of taxes, especially on the rich. The bitter pill prescribed by the Republicans, in brief, puts the onus of sacrifice on the poorest, most helpless of our citizens in order that the wealthiest, most powerful can avoid sacrifice altogether and continue to thrive beyond all imagining. The House passed this plan April 15 on a strictly party-line vote, nearly all Republicans voting for it, and all Democrats opposing it.
What we have come to in this country, then, is a situation where a major party makes little attempt to hide its callousness toward the poor and weak and its devotion to the strong and rich. Oh, Republicans prate on about the “great crisis” of growing deficits, but their emphasis is on the unsustainability of the “social handouts” instituted by Democrats: Social Security, Medicare, and other attempts to mitigate the suffering of the least among us.

What I keep wondering is what kind of people could adopt programs and policies of this kind. Who could be so heartless as to essentially thumb their noses at the vast majority of human beings on this planet (see also Republican-led House vote April 7 to kill EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases and the science they’re based on)? A recent book by Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape) may offer a few answers. It is not that Harris’ book proposes any kind of socially conscious program. It is that in reviewing neuroscientific and psychological research on the possible cognitive bases for morality, Harris cites studies that are quite revealing indeed about such subjects as psychopathology, religion, belief, and the human capacity for empathy.

Begin with a series of studies by the psychologist Paul Slovic, especially concerning our capacity to reason morally about suffering. What Slovic has found is that humans seem to have an innate mechanism that predisposes most of us to show concern when a single, identifiable human life is threatened, but to decrease our concern almost to indifference when more lives are involved. In other words, there is a “psychic numbing” that sets in as the number of victims of any kind of disaster rises. Instead of being MORE concerned the more people are affected by an earthquake, say, our concern grows progressively less as the death toll rises. This is revealed in donations: people give generously when they are shown a single child suffering; but with two children, the donations drop, while, as more children are shown suffering, the donations (and compassion) grow progressively less. There’s even a name for this: the “identifiable victim effect.” What I wonder is if Republicans/conservatives operate in a more exaggerated way than others in this regard. They pride themselves on being very compassionate to their own. But when it’s thousands or millions of inner city kids who are starving, or millions of homeless who have fallen on hard times, or many millions of seniors who depend on the pittance they derive from social security or medicare, Republican compassion disappears. Let them eat cake.

Such focus on the concern (or lack of it) for the suffering of others brings to the fore another area of research, the study of psychopathology. Psychopaths (and we seem to have had some great examples in high office recently) are characterized by able intelligence and even “sanity” (they understand the difference between right and wrong), but a kind of deficit in their ability to feel compassion for the pain or suffering of others. Many violent criminals are categorized as psychopaths: they simply seem unable to feel anything for their victims. Neuroimaging work now suggests that psychopathy is

…a product of pathological arousal and reward. People scoring high on the psychopathic personality inventory show abnormally high activity in the reward regions of their brain (in particular, the nucleus accumbens) in response to amphetamine and while anticipating monetary gains. (p. 98)

Researchers speculate that since psychopaths respond excessively to anticipated rewards (I’m gonna get rich!), their ability to learn from the negative emotions of others is correspondingly reduced or blocked. In fact, in tests asking psychopaths to identify the mental states of other people from photographs, psychopaths do as well as others except in one area: they seem “unable to recognize expressions of fear and sadness in others.” This failure in emotional learning (a human trait crucial to socialization that is shared even by our primate relatives) seems to be one key to psychopathy: neuroscientists believe that impairments in the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex are associated with the emotional failure. Thus blind to the suffering he causes, the psychopath keeps reinforcing his callousness and cruelty, and simply never learns to care about others. While no one would say that all Republicans or conservatives are psychopaths, surely we can see that their apparent failure in empathy (or perhaps their reduced “circle of empathy”—i.e. limited to only those with whom they have close relations) resembles in alarming ways the indifference to human suffering exhibited by the psychopathic personality.

Finally, we see that Republicans/conservatives often tend to be those who demand open, public fealty to religious belief, more specifically, belief in the literal Christian dictates of the Bible (“57% of Americans think one must believe in God to have good values and to be moral, and 69% want a president guided by strong religious belief”). Their demands to end abortion (Rick Santorum recently made a speech in which he attributed the allegedly failing Social Security system to a high abortion rate—so many children not born means too few contributing to Social Security income!), and to make religion more prominent in public forums, schools, and social legislation, are but a few examples of this mania. Harris is very hard on the effects this has for American public life and for morality in general. For if, as Harris maintains, morality can be understood as fostering the well-being of the highest number in any population (rather than with how many profess belief in God), the United States falls far short of other developed nations. Though the U.S. scores extremely high on the religiosity scale, it scores far lower than many allegedly atheistic nations on the well-being/equality scale. As Harris writes, “In addition to being the most religious of developed nations, the United States also has the greatest economic inequality.” By contrast, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, among the most atheistic societies on the planet, all do better on measures of well-being like life expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy, GDP, child welfare, education, political stability, charity to poorer nations, and so on. As the capper to this critique, Harris cites a 2010 study (Hall, Matz, and Wood, “Why don’t we practice what we preach?” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1) indicating that American religious commitment is “highly correlated with racism” (146). If this isn’t strong enough, Harris also cites a recent Baltimore court case in which a small Christian group (One Mind Ministries) was accused of murdering an 18-month-old infant, Javon Thompson. His sin: he stopped saying “Amen” before breakfast, an act considered rebellious by the group’s leader, Queen Antoinette. His punishment: being deprived of all food and water for days. The mother agreed to help the prosecution indict the others on condition that all charges against them would be dropped if her dead child was resurrected. Though the group carried the corpse with them for some time, the resurrection has yet to take place. (Dan Morse, “Plea deal includes resurrection clause,” Washington Post, March 31, 2009.)

Harris does not contend that religious training and/or belief trains people in murder or racism. He does suggest that ignorance and such beliefs go hand in hand, as indicated by these statistics: “42% of Americans believe that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of the world” (149). This is tantamount to saying that evolution, as confirmed by virtually all scientists, simply does not exist. Another 78% believe that the Bible is actually the word of God, while 79% of Christians believe that Jesus will “physically return to the earth.” The point is clear: If so many Americans believe in such “truths,” how can anyone expect them to be able to discern truth from falsehood, or right from wrong in any arena whatever? How can they be expected to understand or exhibit compassion towards all the “unbelievers” out there—including the billions who will be most affected by global warming? How can anyone expect them to care in the least for those homeless “sinners” on our streets who have “failed” to provide for themselves?

When I contemplate the fact that much of this nation has fallen into the hands of such fanatics and incipient psychopaths, I have to tell you, it is very hard not to despair.

Lawrence DiStasi

Moral Wrecktitude

2011-04-18T15:40:00.000-07:00

I mean the best for you, my friend
But your style of life must end
Surely I am heaven sent
To remind you to repent
From your ways of death and sin
So your new life may begin
Accept your meager wages
And read the Good Book’s pages
Look up to us, the chosen
Whose hearts are neatly frozen

Given the recent attacks on Planned Parenthood and even on some labor unions, I am once again reminded of an interview I conducted with a young Hungarian refugee in January 1957. After I listened to him for more than an hour, he suddenly looked at me very seriously and simply said: “You have never had to steal to eat.” I was a West Point cadet, a plebe, at the time and I chronicled the interview for The Pointer magazine. It was clear that his experience was different from mine with one similarity. I had experienced hunger and had gone from 147 pounds to much less than 120 pounds as a motivated cadet living with the discipline of plebe year. Involuntary withdrawal from food was common punishment. So, we both had felt hunger. But there were some significant differences as well. I wanted to be at West Point and food was not a motivator for me. Hungarians were made to ship their food to Russia and had no choice as to where they lived. Hungarians were walled-in by the Russians. When I did get food, it was clean and wholesome. His food was usually stolen from garbage cans and dumps. He watched the inequity of the distribution of food where Communist Party members were able to eat well and avoid the harsh pain felt by the masses. I watched upperclassmen eat full and satisfying meals and wanted to survive long enough to become an upperclassman. Hope was not only in my heart, but tangible because I saw a goal and did things to put it in reach. Upperclassmen had gone through similar plebe years while Communist Party leaders were exempt from privation. Today, we invoke the Christian admonition not to complain about our station in life (slave or free, remember) and urge the poor to be patient. Indeed, patience is a virtue fitting the poor. And had God favored them, they would be wealthy. In both cases the ideology sets the tone and the wage. It is not by accident. The pious politicians that screamed for the de-funding of Planned Parenthood knew or should have known that the Hyde Amendment (appropriately named for the Republican politician who long kept mistresses into his “youthful” 40s including the highly visible Cherie Snodgrass), denies federal funding for any abortion.
Moral superiority has been with us for millennia. The smugness of a Pharisee is noted in the New Testament: (Luke 18:11) “Thank you, Lord that I am not like everyone else, thieving, unjust, adulterous, and especially like that tax collector. I fast twice a week, and tithe everything I posses.” If you fast forward to the late 19th and early 20th century, the American equivalent was the Mugwump. Mugwumps were wealthy and gentrified Christians who were simply appalled at the lower classes, especially immigrants. They became politically active and tried to take away rights, especially to vote, from those citizens without property. Just as Henry Hyde saw no problem with keeping a mistress in a Springfield, IL apartment, he saw no problem with leading the House charge against Clinton for having sex with an intern or, more directly, he saw no problem with not supporting family planning to avoid the likelihood of abortions. In his investigation of Planned Parenthood, the following exchange between Hyde and Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood Is documented:
"Ms. Feldt, does it trouble you that there are so many abortions?"
"Mr. Hyde, if it troubles you," I went off script to reply, "why have you never once voted for family planning services?" Moral superiority does not worry about trifles like doing something to reduce an evil. The morally superior merely need to point it out for the morally inferior to execute.

John Kyl on the Senate floor: “Well over ninety per cent of what Planned Parenthood does is abortions.” Followed by an explanation but not an apology (and not on the Senate floor): “It was not intended to be a factual statement.” (explanation via Lemon on CNN). Planned Parenthood indeed performs abortions along with myriad health support, especially for women. Abortions account for 3% of its activity and it sequesters its funding so that federal money is not used for abortions. Birth control and STD testing as well as general healthcare including breast exams and pap smear tests are made available to poor women. Ugh! Poor women. They are morally inferior to Senator Kyl, and it is not his job to actually reduce abortions. He is responsible to teach the greedy needy about morals. Maybe some of them have to steal to eat. Shame on them again. If they were good Christian women, they would be more patient and surely more submissive to their moral superiors.

Lest we think that this concept of moral superiority is restricted to controlling economically deprived women, consider the following excerpt from Bloomberg in December, 2010 that outlines the business dealings of a major American firm in Nigeria:
“Nigeria alleges the companies, which were part of group known as TSKJ, paid bribes totaling $180 million to Nigerian officials between 1994 and 2004 to win a $6 billion liquefied natural gas plant contract. KBR and Halliburton agreed to pay $579 million to U.S. authorities in February 2009 for bribery payments in Nigeria.” Dick Cheney was head of Halliburton/KBR when the bribery took place and he soon became Vice President of the US. Maybe that was a necessary business expense and if Halliburton paid taxes, surely it also used the $579 Million it paid to our government as a tax write-off. This illegal activity aided profiteering by Cheney, of course, but it also took opportunity from firms that were unwilling to bribe and from impoverished Nigerians who had no say or benefit in the distribution of their nation’s resources.
More recently, the Swedish Ikea Corporation has located a furniture factory in Danville, VA. State and local officials there gave Ikea free land and tax breaks to locate in the Right to Work for Less Commonwealth of Virginia. The starting salaries in Virginia are $8/hour without benefits, while the identical jobs in Sweden pay $19/hour with 3 weeks vacation and full medical benefits. While the cost of living may be lower in Danville, surely the cost of medical benefits is higher than zero. Be patient my Christians and don’t talk with the evil unions who surely will lead you to sin. Be patient, your time will come at the Last Judgment and remember that the Meek will inherit the earth. Therefore, be Meek and you shall inherit the earth (or what is left after the polluters are done). The lesson: Moral superiority means that I get my share now and you can wait until earth freezes over or trickle down works, whichever comes first. Does it matter that the moral superiority is imported or homegrown? Not really, since the Swedes could not have done this without American help.

The more I study our current situation and the Paul Ryan plan to have the poor finance the tax breaks for the wealthy the more I understand the logic of trickle down economics. By changing Medicare to voucher roulette for the poor who cannot afford supplemental insurance, two things happen; first, it is a windfall for healthcare insurance companies to enrich those that will still ration care (only now for paying for expenses like advertising and an unnecessary layer of administration) and, a perfect way to keep millions of Americans in poverty and ill health since a $15,000 annual voucher does nothing to reduce healthcare costs per se, but only reduce to the government budget. The tax breaks for the rich will help them pay for increasing medical expenses and the poor will die sooner thereby becoming eligible for inheriting the earth years earlier. You must look up to the morally superior. They certainly know their scripture and they are willing to give up inheritance of the earth as long as they don’t pay inheritance or any other taxes in this life. Just what is it that trickles down? I think that it is the blood, sweat, and tears of the poor, along with a little of their urine down their pants while they strain to await their inheritance coming in the next life. I guess that atheists will have to develop another theory of morality, justice and trickle down. I call this Moral Wrecktitude where misplaced morality wrecks the lives of the poor and the incredibly shrinking middle class and chills the hearts of the rich (along with their gin).

Peace,
George Giacoppe
18 April 2011

Education Fraud

2011-04-03T19:35:00.000-07:00

Are the pages turning
And is the children learning
As we argue the merit
Of the price of fine claret
Instead of the cost
Of a childhood lost
And the fairness of doctrine
That measures by testing
Our children like bovine
Re-chewing cud while festing

Education is the name and fraud is the game. I recently wrote of the scandalous action of the US Supreme Court in declaring child labor laws unconstitutional both in 1918 and again in 1935 to allow children “more freedom.” This Dickens era approach has recently been expanded by at least three of our states. Maine, Missouri and Utah have legislation pending to strip away the effectiveness of the federal law. The connection of child labor to education is a long and sometimes puzzling one. Horace Mann, way back in the 1840s, persuaded Massachusetts and a few other states to make public schooling mandatory and free to age 16. His theory was that schooling could develop citizens of knowledge and understanding so that they might provide more for themselves and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He felt that by combining the youth of different classes into the same classrooms that society as a whole would benefit and that it would not harm industry. He also wanted to keep kids off the streets where they might be incarcerated instead of educated. Mann traveled to Prussia on his own money to observe their public school system and selected that model for Massachusetts, so there was also a call for discipline and substance in schools. He also established “Normal Schools” that had the mission of educating teachers so that coherent and quality instruction was integral with the school system.

Contrast that with today’s schools that are becoming aimless footballs that bounce along at the whim of politicians trying to create social and economic engineering by toying with basic educational purposes and encouraging a concept of “individual responsibility” in education instead of “commonwealth,” or the common good of the state. That new political emphasis has taken schools from the hands of communities and placed them in state and federal hands. Funding has changed so that states and the federal government have created grants and rules for governance that are unrelated to quality. Foremost is the unfunded federal mandate for “No Child Left Behind.” That law has created an orgy of standardized testing beginning early in the K-12 system with an apparent purpose of grading teachers instead of measuring student progress. Measurement is not inherently evil, but using measurement as a club to punish teachers is counterproductive. Punishment has also generated cheating in most districts in order to avoid the punishment of systems and teachers by closing schools and removing federal monies.

I can recall conducting monthly audits of regional offices in a property casualty insurance company. The office being inspected would take a day or two to prepare for the audit; a day or two to undergo the audit and a day or two to document deficiencies and planned corrective actions. Usually, this resulted in 20 to 25% of available time being spent either in preparation, conduct or review of the audits. That is a waste of time when real work needs to be done and practically guarantees failure the following month. Similarly in our schools, in addition to outright cheating, “NCLB” has spawned a plethora of repetitious testing so that teachers and districts can avoid punitive measures. Like an overuse of audits, it is a waste of time. No real learning gets done. Educational returns diminish rapidly and students may understand that the testing itself is the purpose of school. Some politicians love it because they can then propose closing some schools and rewarding others that have not been caught cheating. More to the point, they can justify reducing budgets and promoting a voucher system where private and religious schools are compensated instead of fixing the problem in our public systems. This is equivalent to official government sabotage and it is often promoted by those who claim “government is the problem.” The concept of initiating official competition to “improve” schools assumes that schools are like opposing athletic teams instead of institutions designed to create a better commonwealth where we, as a nation, can compete using better prepared citizens who will create the future for our nation. It is a faulty assumption and it directly destroys learning instead of creating the climate for learning. It is also a form of class warfare where the wealthy can pay for better education and the poor are captive to an unwieldy system that is being sabotaged in the name of “freedom of choice.” Education becomes an expense instead of an investment. The results are both evident and catastrophic.

Ironically, we now have Charter Schools, school vouchers and repetitive testing that adds cost without benefit to our common good. Instead of focusing our resources on providing targeted assessment and education, we squander resources on vouchers and charter school experiments, wasteful testing that now needs auditing to protect us from cheating, and attacks on teachers including layoffs and their removal from collective bargaining. None of this attacks the problem of developing effective working citizens. Instead, it concentrates budgets further and further from the sources of solving the problems and it creates a workforce of minimum wage workers who must compete with imported labor and exported jobs. Budgets must be closer to the schools. Immediate cities and towns may need to be supplemented from state and federal funds, but the further government is from the problem, the less likely that local differences and needs will be understood. With this as a trend, then education will be only for the wealthy and the poor will be unprepared to compete for meaningful work. Indeed, it is in concert with Maine, Michigan and Utah moving to re-introduce child labor. Since 1980, when many families could live on a single income, the majority of families now require two or more incomes to survive. The total average wage gain in the last 30 years has been only $300 per person while productivity has soared and CEOs have multiplied their salaries and corporate profits have reached record levels. As G W Bush famously asked: “Is the children learning?” Perhaps that conservative’s question provides its own answer. Maybe we should put kids to work to compete with their parents for diminishing wages. The minimum wage can be lowered to solve the education problem. What a concept. No schools, no budget problems, no social movement and no threat from thinking people. Conservative Utopia.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
03 April 2011

The Billionaire Behind the Hate

2011-03-27T16:20:00.000-07:00

That would be the brothers Koch (pron. Kock?), Charles and David. The bros have come into prominence since the rise of the Tea Party, which they direct and supply most of the money for. Staunch Libertarians, which party they also pretty much underwrite, their aim has long been to tear the government “out at the root.” As Jane Mayer in her brilliant article about these dogs in a recent New Yorker article (“Covert Operations,” Aug. 30, 2010) notes, the Libertarian Party platform in 1980, with David Koch on the ticket, advocated abolishing the SEC and the Department of Energy, as well as Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control and all income taxes (especially corporate income taxes). What’s alarming is not only the scope of this “anarcho-totalitarianism” (William Buckley’s term), but the fact that so much of it is beginning to come true. And Koch brothers’ money is part of the reason. That’s because they have oodles of it (ca $35 billion), originally coming from the oil-refining business started by their father, Fred Koch (he joined the John Birch Society in the 50s as one of the loonies who called Pres. Eisenhower a communist). It’s laughable, really. These guys give off the aura of that quintessential American culture hero, the self-made man. But what Mayer points out is that they didn’t exactly start on the level playing field they’re so fond of advocating. No. David Koch was left, upon his father’s death, the neat little sum of $300 million dollars! His other brothers no doubt inherited similar sums. Then David and his brother Charles (the CEO of Koch Industries) bought out their younger brother, and now own the family business lock, stock and barrel. That means no nosy stockholders. They are now nearly as rich as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, and a whole lot of that money goes to their political foundations. Between 1998 and 2008, according to Mayer, these are the donation figures—Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation: $48 million; Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation (controlled by Charlie): $28 million; David H. Koch Charitable Foundation: $120 million; plus $50 million in lobbying, and $8 million to political campaigns through KochPAC (more than 80% to Republicans). In 2010, Koch Industries led all other energy companies (including Exxon) in contributions to political campaigns. And just in case that weren’t enough clout, it was Koch money that in 1977 launched the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank (they have been prominent in attacking Global warming), and a bit later gave millions to another think tank, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University—“ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington.”

The activities of these “think” tanks would be laughable if they weren’t so perversely effective. Mayer cites a court case in 1997 when the EPA tried to reduce surface ozone pollution, much of it coming from oil refineries (the original Koch business, which has been sued constantly for polluting everything from air to ground water). One Susan Dudley, of the Mercatus Center, argued that the EPA had neglected to consider that “smog-free skies would result in more cases of skin cancer.” The Circuit Court actually believed this crap about smog being good, and ruled that, indeed, the EPA had “explicitly disregarded” the “possible health benefits of ozone.” The fact that the judges in the majority had attended “legal junkets” arranged by another group of Koch foundations, allegedly did not affect the ruling.

You get the picture. Big money buys big results, and the Koch brothers have big money they are quite willing and eager to spend. Another of their spin-off groups (this one designed to inspire and direct the grass roots activism the Tea Party is famous for) is named Americans for Prosperity (all of these names are a lesson in Orwellian language.) Minutely managed by the Kochs, Americans for Prosperity has been a key player in attacking the Obama presidency. That great conservative strategist, Grover Norquist, admitted to Mayer that the rowdy rallies by activists in the summer of 2010 were key to “undermining Obama’s agenda.” The people in the streets gave Republican lawmakers the cover they needed to refuse any cooperation with Obama, and changed the thinking of corporate donors. Prior to the demonstrations, even the Chamber of Commerce had been willing to work with the president; after the loonies took to the streets and “terrorized” Congress, this attitude changed.

There is much more to find out about these latter-day bagmen (their bought-out brother recently called their operation an “organized crime” operation because of their history of stealing oil from under Native American reservations—see Reader Supported News, March 20, 2011: “Koch and Native-American Reservation Oil Theft”), and I would recommend Mayer’s article as indispensable. It’s not just that David Koch is the guy who financed Governor Scott Walker’s election, and no doubt had a say in his recent anti-union legislation in Wisconsin; the Kochs also have bought numerous companies to supplement and diversify their oil-refining business, so the stink of their corruption is everywhere. Here’s a partial list of mostly paper products that they now control, sent to me by Eleanor Walden:

Paper products from Georgia-Pacific, including: Angel Soft toilet paper; Brawny paper towels; Dixie plates, bowls, napkins and cups; Mardi Gras napkins and towels; Quilted Northern toilet paper; Soft 'n Gentle toilet paper; Sparkle napkins; Vanity fair napkins; and Zee napkins. There’s a national campaign to boycott all of these products. I would urge everyone to do so, because if there’s one place these guys can be hurt, it’s in their deep, dirty pockets. (Related addendum: a March 14 article in Yahoo news noted that U.S. millionaires in a survey complained that even $7 million was not quite enough to feel rich. The poor guys compare themselves to their fellow princelings, and also worry a lot about outliving their meager assets. Doesn’t your heart just bleed for them?)

Lawrence DiStasi

GE: No Tax Special

2011-03-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

If I hadn’t just read it, I’d never believe it. G.E.—you remember, the company Ronald Reagan used to shill for; the company that built many of the nuclear reactors now under suspicion; the company whose CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, was recently appointed by President Obama to be his liaison to the business community, as well as to head up the President’s “Committee on Jobs and Competitiveness” (slated to discuss corporate tax policy, the Pres. says, so as to LOWER the corporate tax rate)—last year “reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion,” $5.1 billion of which came from its U.S. operations. And its American tax bill? ZERO. No tax paid. “In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion,” writes David Kocieniewski in the 3/25/11 New York Times.

How can this be? you might ask. The government is crying about its indebtedness. Republicans and even Democrats are calling for austerity—i.e. cutting spending, i.e. cutting the benefits to the neediest members of our society, with plans to cut even more. And one of the richest corporations in America is paying NO TAX? Could it be that America doesn’t have a spending problem, that it has an INCOME problem because the richest individuals and corporations are paying less and less each year??? Do you think? Listen to what Kocieniewski writes, after recounting how G.E. spends a fortune in lobbying ($200 million over the last decade), and on a G.E. tax department headed by former IRS employees and lawyers numbering no less than 975 individuals! who do nothing but work on how to take advantage of tax breaks so that G.E. pays NO taxes:

Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws that encouraged some businesses and professionals to file as individuals, have pushed down the corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts — from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.
Did you get that? Corporations—the alleged lifeblood of our economy, the ones who were just given permission, as PERSONS, to contribute unlimited amounts to political campaigns—not long ago paid nearly a third of the U.S. tax burden, but now pay less than a tenth and may soon pay less than a twentieth.

Ah but, they keep saying, we need to be competitive. What’s good for us is good for America and American workers. Oh really? Here’s the truth:

Since 2003, the company has eliminated a fifth of its work force in the United States, while increasing overseas employment. In that time, G.E.’s accumulated offshore profits have risen to $92 billion from $15 billion.
And what does earning all that money overseas do for G.E.? Well several things. This is because the other big change in G.E.’s business has been a shift from producing goods (like lightbulbs and all the “good things G.E. brings to life”) to providing financing for its products. “GE Capital” is the name of this finance division and more than half of G.E.’s profit recently has come from financing. Then the company managed to muscle changes in the tax laws that allow multinationals “to avoid taxes on some kinds of banking and insurance income.” This is known as “active financing.” It means that “if G.E. financed the sale of a jet engine or generator in Ireland, for example, the company would no longer have to pay American tax on the interest income as long as the profits remained offshore.” G.E. has been diligent in doing this, that is, booking a huge percentage of its profits in low-tax countries like Ireland and Singapore and keeping them there, a practice that, according to one tax economist, has “allowed G.E. to bring its U.S. effective tax rate to rock-bottom levels.” In the past year, in fact, to ZERO. No, less than zero, because it got a benefit of $3.2 billion!

So, in effect, G.E. has said to the United States and its people: “fuck you.” It manufactures more and more of its goods abroad, thus destroying American jobs, makes and keeps its profits abroad, and then gets tax benefits for all this that are applied to the little tax obligation (from goods still manufactured in the U.S.) it hasn’t found a loophole to worm its way out of. G.E. explains this by saying it has an obligation to its shareholders to “legally minimize its costs.” Some would call it more like “corporate welfare” (I would call it corporate thievery.) And what I’m wondering is, How is it that Americans who can barely buy food are pilloried as “welfare queens,” and made to work for their benefits, while these big time welfare queens get lionized, deferred to in every way, and even appointed to the President’s inner circle of advisers?

It’s called corruption, folks, and because of it the United States is looking more and more like one of those banana republics we used to laugh at in the old days, but no more. And if there’s a question left, it can only be: how long can such wanton pillaging of a nation go on? The answer is simple: as long as we the people let it.

Lawrence DiStasi

Nuclear Reactors: Full Speed Ahead

2011-03-17T07:43:00.000-07:00

Amid all the horrors engulfing Japan (and the rest of the world as it watches in fear and trembling) not only via the earthquake and tsunami, but also via the possibility, increasing hourly, of one or more nuclear meltdowns, it is “encouraging” to note that some intrepid Americans are undaunted. Today, for example, that great representative from Texas, Joe Barton, was badgering Energy Secretary Stephen Chu in a hearing before his Energy and Commerce Committee. Barton—who some may remember as the “bright light” who apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward: “I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is again in my words amounts to a ‘shakedown’ so I apologize” (seriously, those are the words he used) and who, it was later revealed, has received some $1,330,160 in “oil money” during his career—kept asking Chu if the Obama administration’s earlier promise to push for the building of more nuclear plants in the U.S. by providing loan guarantees of $56 billion still held. Chu answered in a complex way, and Barton persisted: “Is that a “yes?” Chu danced a bit more, but then answered, “Yes.” Barton then asked a further question amounting to the same thing, and this time got a prompt “Yes” from Chu. “Ah, you’re learning,” chortled the chairman; for he had the answer he wanted. The United States was not going to be deterred by a little meltdown in Japan, or by the rising panic among the world’s peoples about all the nuclear power plants that could spew radiation in unforeseeable directions due to unforeseeable accidents, or the minor problem of what to do with all that spent fuel lasting millennia. Hell no! Energy is needed, plutonium is needed, and real men like Barton aren’t afraid of what a little radiation does to the human body (nor, it seems, is the Obama administration), so it’s full speed ahead.

So here we are. The Japanese are running out of options to cool down these out-of-control nuclear reactors. They’ve been pumping sea water, probably using fire trucks in tandem to get enough pressure to pump the water onto the fuel rods, or replace the evaporating water from the pools storing spent rods still generating radioactive materials and heat, but they’re running out of fuel to keep the fire engines running. Worse, they’ve just this morning had to allow the skeleton crew (no pun intended) of 50 workers or so to take a break because the radiation levels were getting too high even for these sacrificial lambs. Meantime, the temperature in these reactors keeps rising inexorably. 2500 degrees. 3000 degrees. It’s hell on earth.

Herein lies the crux of the matter. Nuclear fission creates heat. So does just the normal process of radioactive decay of the materials that are used in the fuel rods (i.e. even after the reactor is shut down). The geniuses who designed this technology figured that all they’d have to do was keep the process cool with water. Keep circulating water to cool the fuel rods and all would be fine. But all isn’t fine. Electricity to pump the water fails. Generators to replace the electricity are stored in the basement and a tsunami floods the basement and disables the generators. Then sea water gets pumped in, but that also has its limits. Helicopters are called in to dump sea water into the blown-apart reactors (the explosion caused by the steam created by water on hot rods, and the release of hydrogen which blows up), but the radiation is too high for the helicopter pilots to fly over the reactors. In short, the breakdown and remedial measures amount to a chain reaction that mimics the chain reaction that creates nuclear energy (and bombs) in the first place.

This hellish, impossible-to-control technology is the reason that governments, like the Obama administration, have to guarantee the loans needed to build these reactors. Investors on Wall Street want no part of this stuff. Banks won’t take the risk on their own. And why? Because the whole process is too hazardous, too fraught with potential disasters: Three Mile Island; Chernobyl; and now Fukushima. So whose money is going to fill the gap? Why, yours and mine, courtesy of the United States government, which pledges that if anything goes wrong (and how could it not go wrong eventually?), the federal government will pay off whatever loans or costs have accrued. And they are huge. Because though it seems “free,” this is expensive technology. And the only entity willing to take the risk by subsidizing it is the government. Reminds us of that other huge risk the government provides welfare checks for: war, the insanely expensive machines of war.

But will the world backtrack from its insane nuclear gamble? Hell no. We need war; we need energy. And so we get Joe Barton, that dimwit who considers global warming natural,

I believe that Earth’s climate is changing, but I think it’s changing for natural reasons. And I think mankind has been adopting, or adapting, to climate as long as man has walked the Earth…Adaptation is the practical, affordable, utterly natural reflex response to nature when the planet is heating or cooling, as it always is.

Global warming? Just adapt, says Joe. Nuclear meltdowns? Just adapt. And the Obama administration, in the face of pressure from the likes of Barton, has to demonstrate its courage even in the face of planetary disaster. It’s what we elect these big boys for, after all: Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.

Lawrence DiStasi
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Forget Shame

2011-03-10T15:39:00.000-08:00

As I watched Michael Moore deliver a white hot speech in Wisconsin a few days ago, and heard the voices of his audience—state workers protesting the concerted Republican assault on public sector unions by yelling “Shame! Shame! Shame!”—it occurred to me. This time, folks, shaming those in power isn’t going to be enough. Though it was enough to bring down two presidents—Johnson and Nixon—in the 60s and 70s, and to eventually stop the Vietnam War, it won’t make even a dent in the armor worn by today’s ruling class. I mean, just think of it: two short years ago, the country seemed so disgusted by the overt criminality of Bush and his gang in the White House that his name was too toxic to even mention. The entire Republican Party was said to be near extinction, while a Prince of the Left had been elected to the White House. And yet, today that same prince is in retreat on every front, groveling before the right, while the worst yahoos ever seen in public office are screaming for the blood of gliberals and their devastated constituency. So we can forget tears, forget revulsion about war, murder, the evisceration of the social net so laboriously put in place over several generations, the enslavement of the newly impoverished, and all the rest. The power mongers and their lackeys in office are simply not susceptible to these common human emotions. Like their forebears in the Germany of the 1930s, they seem to rather enjoy the suffering of those beneath their boot heels. And they’ll do anything, from dirty tricks to the crippling and/or poisoning of workers, to the poisoning of the entire planet, to protect what they view as “theirs.” Hence, we have this so-called Representative from New York, Peter King, our era’s Joe McCarthy, opening hearings on the “radicalization of the Muslim-American community by Al-Qaeda,” impervious to the tears of Congressman Ellison testifying about the sacrifice of one of these “terrorists” who died trying to save his fellow Americans on 9/11, and begging for the hearings to focus on a wider population than this already terrorized minority. And we have this punk governor of Wisconsin along with his newly-empowered Republican majority, ramming through in secret, when he couldn’t persuade by reason, the bill to strip unionized state employees of their collective bargaining rights. Shame? This crude piece of plastic doesn’t even register the stuff in whatever constitutes his innards. All he registers is the coin he gets from the likes of David Koch, the energy baron who’s the largest funder of anti-global-warming science in the world (even larger than Exxon) and the main bankroller of the Tea Party. I haven’t been able to find out if Koch is involved in ‘hydrofracking,’ the latest darling of energy bandits—see the NY Times, Feb. 27, for information on what ‘horizontal hydraulic fracturing’ does to the huge volume of water needed to “frack” the natural gas out of rock, and the corrosive salts, carcinogens, and yes radioactive elements like radium polluting that water when it drains into nearby rivers and aquifers used for drinking—but I wouldn’t be surprised.

So here’s what we’re up against now. These billionaires who brought the country to its knees and emerged richer than ever have now been given even greater power to control politicians and laws than they had during the Gilded Age. The gap between them and the rest of us has grown in the last thirty years—since that corporate shill Ronald Reagan began his assault on graduated income taxes and regulations keeping the corporate rape of the rest of us within some bounds—to a level of inequality in the distribution of wealth and power that rivals Arab sheikdoms. A few of these mandarins control more wealth than whole counties, whole states, whole regions of us. And they will do anything, corrupt any politician, commit any crime, decimate whole countries, whole planets, to keep it.

Shame them? It doesn’t even merit discussion. The only thing that impresses these robots is force. The force of millions of people screaming for their heads. The force of organized and constant pressure outing them and their crimes. The public employees in Wisconsin have begun this movement. So have a few thousands in states like Michigan and Indiana, where similar bills have been passed or are pending. But it is quite clear from the Wisconsin experience that more, far more, is going to be needed. There’s going to have to be not just a few victories over crumbs; a few compromises like “carbon trading” and extended unemployment; there’s going to have to be systemic change. And as far as I can see, that’s not going to happen unless these bastards are made to fear not only for their fortunes, but for their very existence. How is this to happen? I have no specific solutions; besides, it’s a project for the young. But as Michael Moore pointed out in Wisconsin, and as the people always seem to forget: there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them. That’s what terrifies them in the night. They know that if the people ever wake up, if the people ever become conscious of their power and use it, the game, the game whereby the corporate pooh-bahs have not only seized obscene amounts of wealth and power, but used it to exploit and blight everything that makes life itself possible, is over.

I’m putting my money on an awakening. But it had better happen soon, because the damage is accelerating so fast that before long there won’t be much left to save.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Illusion of Control

2011-03-02T17:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was observing someone playing with a new iPad, waxing enthusiastic about how great it was. And in fact, the graphics are gorgeous, the screen luminous, the applications almost endless and endlessly powerful. You can have your favorite music on the thing, your favorite photos, your favorite books on its super reader, your favorite blogs constantly updated, and all of it available at the literal touch of your finger as it scrolls effortlessly through your increasingly digitized world. Fully loaded, it knows all kinds of things about you, including when you need to enter data, whereupon it automatically displays a keyboard on your screen.

And as I mulled about this later, and about the marvelous control offered by iPhones and iPods and all the other gadgets beguiling each of us with constantly-updated information geared specifically to ME, this notion of ‘the world at your fingertips’ started to appear in a slightly different light. My music, my websites, my blogs, my photos, my world—it’s all about some postmodern illusion that if I can just buy enough gadgets, I can inhabit a world that is tailor-made for me alone. I don’t have to wait for a radio to play my favorite song: I can have it and all my other favorites on my iPod/Phone/Pad. I needn’t listen to other crap—other songs, traffic, bird calls, jabbering other people, construction noise--ever again. Plugged in, I can control my sound environment, and then my visual environment, and my information environment, and everything else in my world.

And yes, it’s an illusion. And the question always is, who—and I can be sure it’s not only me—benefits from this illusion of control. Who gains from my thinking that I can actually, and for an increasingly affordable price, control my world? Well, how about the mandarins who actually do control the world? How about the corporate masters who have, in the last 30 or 40 years, increased by geometric leaps and bounds their share of the wealth of not just this country but the entire world? It’s a bit like bread and circuses in ancient Rome: If the plebes can be given entertainments that are gripping enough (and the slaughter of a few Christians, or gladiators, or lions is quite tolerable for this), then they’re less likely to demand a real life. In our world, it’s bread and circuses as well—the Super Bowl and all sporting events, the Academy Awards and all contests, stupid sitcoms and countless murder-and-mayhem cop shows to keep everyone at home and off the streets—but increasingly now, it’s our gadgets. If the plebes can be sold the illusion of control, they won’t notice that they have no control at all. Democracy? A joke. No matter who’s in power, money talks. Not votes. Money. Those with it get more powerful, those without it get the illusion of power via more and more gigabytes, greater capacity to find a new restaurant via GPS, and even the occasional ‘opportunity’ to cast a meaningless vote or two.

Lest one think that this illusion of control is peculiar to our age, it’s important to see that the illusion goes deeper than iPads. Or rather, the human urge to get control does. If one thinks about it, all of civilization constitutes an attempt to assert control over the constantly changing vicissitudes of life. Humans invent fire to control it, to warm themselves with it, to frighten threatening animals with it, to cook with it. Levi Strauss made a great deal of this, of cooking, drawing an elementary distinction between the raw and the cooked. Those who eat things raw are animals; primitive life forms. Those who cook are the civilized ones. Cooking not only makes food more digestible, it sets up the basic distinction upon which civilization is built: raw vs. cooked. And it leads to other distinctions: tame vs. wild, agriculture vs. hunting/gathering; protection from the elements vs. exposure to them. And it is all a question of control, of controlling the environment, making it habitable no matter the weather or the availability of wild food, no matter the gods who control such things. And of course, this level of control can be extended almost infinitely: control of weather, control of travel, control of life itself in its most fundamental code, the gene.

More deeply still, the very symbol of humanity, conscious thought, if introspected, can be viewed in this light as well. Those who meditate find this out very quickly. The mind is an inexhaustible thought machine. Consciousness, or what we think of as consciousness, is almost totally consumed with a continuous train of thoughts: thoughts about what we shall do later, thoughts about what we have done earlier, thoughts about how we can prevent this event from going bad or get even with the one who made that event go bad, thoughts about how to best control the situations that are coming and/or edit the past dramas we’d like to change. Very little time is spent, under normal circumstances, attending to what is happening now. The actual conditions of this moment. And the illusion is that as long as I—what I consider to be my basic self, which is this conscious self thinking and apparently controlling my story—am engaged in this sort of thinking and controlling what I see and feel and am, then “I” am in control. And of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The conscious “I” controls very little in life. Most of what we perceive, and most of what we make decisions about, is perceived and decided upon long before the conscious self appears to resolve it. Milliseconds before I choose to go get a snack from the frig, the impulse has already been set in motion in stomach and brain. Well before I think to go chat up that lady, interior impulses have already impelled me to do so. So where Descartes famously concluded that “I think, therefore I am,” a galaxy of information indicates that human being is controlled at a considerable remove from conscious thought. This is not to say that the illusion of control afforded by such ‘thinking’ can’t be useful and even necessary. Imagining that we are in control has undeniably beneficial effects, especially for those who have grown up in chaotic environments where the feeling of chaos and lack of control can be deeply debilitating. But as an exclusive diet, as a controlling illusion, it leads us to all the ills to which humans are subject. As Stephen Asma notes in a recent book (Why I Am a Buddhist), the desire to be a self in control is the fundamental problem: “Once we give up on this exaggerated delusion of control, we attain some degree of liberation—we stop trying to own everything; this is my experience, this is mine, this is I, this is myself.”

Nor do we have to buy into the Buddhist idea of liberation to see that the illusion of control, the desire for control over all life has led humans into a serious dilemma. One aspect of it has already been noted: being deluded about our control, being diverted into meaningless forms of control, makes it easier for those who have ruthlessly grabbed power to maintain their power over us. A population busy with iPads or iPods is less likely to make trouble over the growing income gap. But even more serious consequences of this mania for control can be seen just as easily. Civilization and the “control” it provides humans has driven us to the edge of a cliff. In this ultimate sense, we have gained “control” over our environment—we use fossil fuel to power our lives; we use corporate agriculture to reduce the work necessary to feed more and more of us; we use scientific ingenuity to control our susceptibility to disease and even death--only to find that we are controlling ourselves into overpopulation, global warming from overuse of fossil fuels, and the feverish destruction of the critical varieties of plant and animal life we have evolved with and will, at some point, be unable to do without.

In this sense, control is a paradox: The more we control our planet, the more we lose what it provides us to survive. And we are all, without exception, susceptible to this; all of us, to one degree or another, ‘control freaks.’

So what to do? How control the mania to control?

If I knew, I wouldn’t have to write about it. But quite possibly it’s as simple as recognizing it in ourselves and others, and gradually letting go of the illusion. The fundamental truth is that life cannot be controlled. Life is defined by its uncontrollability (Interesting how word usage intuits this: the term “out of control” is now used as a superlative akin to “awesome”). The more we try, the unhappier we get. The more we try, the unhappier all other life gets as well. I’m reminded of George Carlin’s wonderful riff on “stuff.” We spend our lives trying to accumulate as much “stuff” as we can, as much stuff as our neighbors seem to have. And then as our apartments and houses and garages fill up with “stuff,” we have to find or buy new stuff to store all the useless stuff we’ve accumulated, and so have to keep accumulating ad infinitum, our lives reduced to the idiocy of getting and keeping and finding ways to store more and more until we are more controlled by our stuff than it is by us. Carlin made this funny. But the humor came from the fact that we all know how truly, sadly insane it is.

Lawrence DiStasi

New Deal Redoux?

2011-02-20T15:26:00.000-08:00

The amazing mobility of labor
Gave us all something to savor
Lifting oneself by the bootstraps
And closing society’s gaps
Work hard and stay clean!
And soon you rise on the scene
But far more than our mobility
Has been our inherent nobility
And world-class productivity
Of our mid-class working humanity
They work and they play
Full taxes they pay
Unlike the high and the mighty
Who use loopholes daily and nightly

The drama being played out in Madison, Wisconsin is being compared to the uprisings in Egypt. Wrong place. Wrong time. It should remind us of the heritage of our working middle class that was earned through the blood, sweat and tears of unions in the 1920s and 1930s. Conservatives of that time writhed in agony to witness the decline of Darwinian social politics and the rise of basic equality of opportunity in these United States. In the early days of the labor movement, state and even federal government sided with corporations to the point of brutal suppression of workers through gunfire and police batons. And the executive branch of government was not alone. Child labor laws enacted in 1916 restricted child labor to a minimum extent, however the Supreme Court overturned the Keating-Owens Child Labor Act of 1916 by their Hammer vs. Dagenhart decision in 1918 that encouraged exploitation of children in the workplace and as a ploy to maintain low wages. That remained a law of the land until 1933 when Congress again enacted legislation to restrict child labor. Again the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional in 1935. Later, FDR signed into law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It was actually 1941 when a new Supreme Court finally affirmed FLSA as the law of the land and stopped the abuse. Only after 1938 were wages allowed to rise without interference from the Supreme Court and only through the concerted action of unions. Those of you who hold an image of the Supreme Court as wise and prudent interpreters of our laws need only review the history to see your error. Activist Supreme Court judges have ruled the bench for decades if not centuries. They supported corporations, not humans, and surely not children.

Were it not for unions, we would not today have the 40 hour work week nor the 8 hour work day. Safety in the workplace would be only at the will of the employer as in the days of the Manhattan garment workers fire in 1911 when 146 young women perished in a fire because the doors were locked. to keep them from taking breaks or leaving their work stations during their 72 hour work week. Management locked the doors to stairwells and women jumped to their deaths or burned in place. The International Garment Worker’s Union grew largely due to that fire. This is a time to remind the reader that unions were not some spontaneous expression of antagonism to management and corporations; they were instead caused by corporate and management abuse of power. Unions were an answer to capricious and arbitrary decisions about wages and working conditions. This was true in industry, in mining, in railroads and in all sectors of economic activity. At their peak in 1954, unions represented nearly 36% of American workers and had an influence that reached all economic sectors. It was about that time that corporate management and state governments felt that wages and, therefore, pensions had grown too large. As a result, “right to work” laws were enacted in many southern states. Quickly, textile and shoe and manufacturing corporations fled south where they got tax breaks, free land and other incentives to relocate their businesses. Unions shrank. In some “right to work” states the remaining unions were required to represent workers who paid no dues based on new laws. This was a blow both to union financing and to membership. Today, only about 7% of the private sector is unionized. Note that wages continued to fall without union protection and the flood of companies that surged into Alabama, the Carolinas and even Georgia and Tennessee did not stop their lower wage migration. They soon left to manufacture in Asia; first in Japan and then Taiwan and then Mainland China and even Vietnam and Malaysia. Once the cascade for lower wages begins, it becomes an unstoppable torrent that falls ever further to find the most depressed economies.

During this period, unions made concessions, perhaps in the hope of maintaining some of the jobs that were available and unions were characterized by corporations as the source of our economic problems. As a single example, the auto industry, notably GM, moved to “right to work” states to avoid unions. GM established Saturn in 1985, and it went out of business completely in 2010 without ever earning a single dollar profit in all the years it existed in Tennessee. GM had blamed unions for its woes when unsatisfactory leadership by CEO Roger Smith, unsatisfactory quality, especially in the early years, and competition with its other GM brands caused Saturn to fail. Failure had nothing to do with unions. Quality competition from Europe and Asia, where wages eventually became higher than American wages actually depressed GM sales along with other US automakers. Blame the unions? Boeing strove to kill unions with its 787 “Dreamliner” by outsourcing major components overseas. Result? Boeing is 3 years past due on delivery and billions over budget by not using their experienced union labor.

With the decline of union membership in US corporations, there came a nearly simultaneous, although mostly unrelated, growth in public sector unions. Once again, unions were caused and not a simultaneous expression of hatred for management. The largest single factor for public sector union growth was the simple fact that government jobs had been used as political capital for patronage and that workers had no control over being fired arbitrarily as a new party was swept into power. At the national level, civil service rules assisted workers to some extent, but that was reversed under GW Bush who wanted more freedom to “reward and punish performance” as he put the issue. In fact, patronage jobs went far deeper under GW Bush than any prior president. States quickly followed suit, except that unions were a stabilizing force that kept most workers on their jobs despite the political winds of change. That was good for both the workers and for people expecting continuity of quality public service despite varying election outcomes. The Bush model increased worker turbulance.

Fast forward to late 2007 and the continuing burden of a war of choice in Iraq and growing war efforts in Afghanistan and the collapse of the housing and lending industry due to malfeasance of corporate management and fundamental greed and…Poof! We have an unmatched fiscal and job crisis unseen since FDR’s days. Obviously, somebody should be punished for the widespread fraud and failure of our lending and our investment institutions. Pension funds, both individual and institutional, were devastated. Jobs were slashed. Balanced budgets became distant memories. Who can we punish? The perpetrators? Well, no. They are too big to fail. Let us get concessions from those who lost money in the pension funds and layoffs. Somebody has to pay. And so it came to pass that public sector unions and the real people who pay taxes were called upon to make new concessions. They did. Now if you can afford the tax accountants and attorneys to protect your income, you can still send your bonus dollars to the Grand Caymans for safekeeping.

Return to Wisconsin and Governor Scott Walker (bankrolled by Koch Industries) and you see the drama played out to bust unions and finally undo what FDR and unions wrought after years of fighting for some justice in treatment of labor. If unions are eliminated by this well financed conservative push, then you need to remember that it was unions that bargained collectively for each of us. I have never been a union member, but my pay was influenced by what unions derived at the table. Even in the Army, my pay was increased by what the postal workers were able to get through collective bargaining. If that is eliminated, then kiss goodbye to social and economic mobility as well as safety and stability. Bye to safety nets like public education, Social Security and Medicare. Say hello to the new robber barons and their conservative supporters who will finally undo the New Deal and present the Raw Deal. Unions, weak as they are, may be our last best hope to preserve education, dignity and mobility in these United States. We are moving from the justice of the people to the “just us” of the Oligarchs. Please speak up before it is too late. Maybe it is also time to impeach a few of the “Supremes” for conflict of interest.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
20 February 2011

In Case You had any Doubts

2011-02-18T19:11:00.000-08:00

In case you had any doubts about what the recent elections (a landslide for Republicans) and the continuing effects of the economic meltdown portend, a few episodes should dispel them. I think my favorite this week is what’s going on in Wisconsin. There, once the cradle of radical politics not to mention the birth in the 50s of the public employee union movement, a yahoo by the name of Scott Walker was elected governor, and both houses of the legislature fell to the Republicans as well (not to mention the defeat of one of the last ethical Senators, Russ Feingold.) I’m not sure what happened to the drinking water in Wisconsin, but the results are beginning to play out big time. Governor Walker has initiated a bill, just passed by the budget committee, that would strip Wisconsin’s public employee unions of their right to collective bargaining. So where most of us thought that the right to collective bargaining was an issue long-since settled (after millions marched, endured beatings from hired thugs, and were murdered by those same thugs in the battles for union rights), it now turns out that this wannabe dictator in Wisconsin is coming close to turning back the clock on teachers, prison guards and other public employees. This so his plan to force these employees to pay more of the cost of their pensions and health care costs could not be reversed by collective bargaining. Isn’t that nice? Not only that, the unions would be hamstrung so that pay increases would be tied to the Consumer Price Index only. And to enforce his decrees, Walker has threatened to call out the National Guard to run the prisons (just in case the prison guards try to strike). So there you have it: no collective bargaining, no effective striking, no power to unions at all (does it need to be said that public unions are about the only large groups left contributing to the Democratic Party?).

If this bill goes through—and the Gov claims he has the votes to do it—another nail in the coffin of unions and collective bargaining would be hammered in. The movement started shortly after WWII by big corporations, and sent into high gear by Ronald Reagan when he fired Air Traffic Controllers to cripple their union (and all others), will have come to fruition. Does it need to be pointed out that this comes at just the time when American corporations are at the very height of their power, having been given, in the Citizens United case in the Supreme Court, carte blanche to pay politicians for the favors they already controlled before? Now, with this complete judicial sanction to corporations to buy whatever government they please (is it any wonder that Obama has kowtowed almost completely to the moneyed interests, and hired the head of General Electric, for god’s sake, which outsources to foreign countries more than half of its work, to be his top economic advisor in charge of “putting Americans back to work?”), the fiction that America is a “government of the people” has become laughable, a cruel, sick joke.

One could add more. In Florida, the Governor there has just axed the planned high-speed rail project, saying the state could not afford it. But the federal government was providing millions in seed money, and the state had already spent more millions in planning for the rail system that was projected to add millions to the tourist economy on which Florida depends (not to mention reducing automobile pollution). And hundreds of thousands of workers would have been hired to complete and then run the project. Nevermind. Those were just “workers” after all, and in the Republican version of economics, workers, like the environment, are simply expendable.

The irony, I suppose, is that all this is taking place at a time when in the Middle East, where democracy has only been a label to dress up dictatorships, the people really are in revolt. So as we watch thousands and millions in Egypt and Tunisia rise up, protest their powerlessness, and force their dictators to resign, and thousands more in Bahrain and Yemen take to the streets to try to do the same, here in the U.S.A. the “people” have so far been mute. Not in Wisconsin, thankfully, where thousands of teachers camped out in the state capitol to protest the proposed slashing of their rights. But in most other places, the “people” have been largely sidelined by the logic of what Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine.” That is, when those in power wish to cripple their opposition and remake society to their liking (i.e. privatize publicly-owned utilities/schools/industries, eliminate social programs that benefit the poor, reduce taxes on the rich), the best way to do so is to wait for or engineer a shock to the system—something like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, or 9/11 throughout the nation. And so, what we are seeing now, after the “shock” of the financial collapse in 2007-08, and to combat which the federal government bailed out banks and wall street with borrowed money, is all this conservative blather about THE FEDERAL DEFICIT. ‘We have to bring spending under control. We have to manage our nation’s budget the same way families do. Control our spending. Trim our sails.’ And what has to be trimmed? Why all that spending on the poor, all that spending on health care for those who can’t afford it like Medicaid, all those handouts to those lazy ones who line up for food stamps and health care for their children and block grants to local clinics and, ultimately, that major “handout” conceived by the demon Roosevelt Administration, Social Security.

Ah yes. The shock has been administered, and now come the shocking proposals. Not the masters of war, not the crooks on Wall St, not the bankers and corporate CEOs, but public employees are the freeloaders. Why should they get pensions? Why should they get free health care? Why should their unions get to hold up taxpayers with their threats of strikes? Why should we get taxed to pay for their benefits? Privatize everything. Bring in the corporate mavens to run (or is it ruin?) everything.

Ah America. The day of awakening is coming, the day of accounting is coming, and it’s not going to be pretty.

Lawrence DiStasi

Genesis of Failure

2011-01-23T15:02:00.000-08:00

A smirk, a nod, a wink
Now who would ever think
That could erode our state’s
Effectiveness and charm
Or destabilize our fate
And do us long term harm
But the smirk became a sneer
That broadened every year
Becoming then a smear
That covered efforts dear
And that became a shout
To throw the bastards out
And shouts became the shots
At the haves from the have nots

As I try to make sense out of the current state of our democracy, I am reminded how Ronald Reagan cleverly created anecdotes to emphasize his political points, but even Reagan would not be able to understand how much this one anecdote has morphed. You may recall Reagan telling this “story”: “I am from the government and I am here to help.” It was pretty innocent and meant to generate a smirk or two if not a laugh. Yes, of course, Reagan emphasized the negative aspects of government in order to make a political point as well as to entertain his audiences. He favored outsourcing and espoused “small” government although he grew it at an alarming pace along with additional deficits of $1.6 trillion. At no time, in my recollection, did Reagan suggest the destruction of government in order to reach his goals. That task was seized by Grover Norquist: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Drowning is destruction in most contexts including that of government. We will look at how that concept of destruction has gone viral.

It took years after Reagan for the smirk to become a sneer. Under Clinton, the negative regard for government took deeper root. Right wing Christian fundamentalists led the charge against Clinton partly due to his personal behavior yet the government shrunk slightly during his Administration. Under Clinton, another aspect contributed to the erosion of faith in government. The Waco, Texas law enforcement against Davidians seemed eerily similar to the war philosophy of destroying a village in order to save it. Clearly, Davidians were armed and wrong, but did our methods exceed expected enforcement? Clinton added $1.5 trillion to our debt in his 8-year administration, while our debt grew by another $1.6 trillion in a mere 4 years under GHW Bush. Clinton was followed by GW Bush who added a whopping $5.5 trillion to our debt. The “conservative Republican” portion of the $10.5 trillion added to our national debt prior to Obama was $8.7 trillion. GW Bush alone accounted for 64% of the added debt under Republicans. Bush Jr. may have been influenced by Vice President Dick Cheney who simply said: “Deficits don’t matter.” Deficits have become a major talking point by citizens on both sides of the political divide with largely conservative rhetoric followed by profligate spending. This has exacerbated distrust of government as well as income differences. We borrowed money to fund tax reductions and moved to tax rates not seen since 1950. The move sharply increased incomes for the rich while the middle class received a smaller share and lost good manufacturing jobs. Tax and spend or borrow and spend?

Another controversial policy that eroded our faith in government was the removal of a social safety net that protected both mentally ill individuals and society at large. The Lamterman-Petris-Short Act signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era of neglect of mental health patients by transferring them to community centers where they languished and lacked the intensive support of psychiatric institutions. At the time in 1967, it appeared to be a humane way to reduce costs and yet provide an effective structure for delivering care and it came with some federal money to reduce the impact on California. The law also prohibited involuntary commitment, so, predictably, some patients refused treatment. Unfortunately, many patients soon were simply homeless and without treatment while they became more visible to the general population. His budget bill abolished 1700 hospital staff positions and closed several state-operated aftercare facilities. People discovered the previously invisible mental patients and many reacted as though government had failed again.

Trust in government has tanked in the past couple decades and excessive spending but borrowing has only played into that image. Another contributor was media extremists like Rush Limbaugh, who has imitators but no peer on the left, depend on outrageous accusations and chatter that help erode respect for government while they build listener rosters. I have recently seen Glen Beck call for “shooting Democrats in the head,” supposedly before they “shoot you in the head.” Increasingly, citizens have begun to relate to “government” as some anonymous and distant “enemy” rather than an outcome of democratic voting. They wanted more immediate and responsive action to address grievances or fears. In the 2000 election, right wing activists stormed some vote counting centers in Florida demanding immediate redress by stopping recounts. Today, they would probably carry guns. This seems to be just opposite what democratic processes require. Miss-steps by elected government continued, however. Under Bush Jr., for example, the questionable war in Iraq was followed by the establishment of a domestic monitoring system of all phone calls by ATT from a San Francisco center. That became a reality that shook some Americans, although it was allegedly done to eliminate and then monitor terrorists. Could Americans be the focus of information gathering by their government? For some, this added to their distrust of government while others felt that the practice was needed to spy on potential terrorists. A divide opened wider and “foreign terrorists” were targets of vituperative language. Soon anybody that looked or sounded Middle-Eastern or Islamic was isolated and condemned in the media and some political extremists. As the economy slipped to recession in 2007 and 2008, additional blame games began. The middle class shrunk while the rich were much richer and while some blamed government policies, others blamed Mexican immigrants. The anti-immigrant rhetoric soared. Meanwhile the arming of individual Americans grew with the lexicon of fear. Some Tea Party events look more like sedition than support of conservative policy.

If you are both a plutocrat and an extremist, then one way of accelerating your goals would be to have the government acquire so much debt that only draconian measures could save the day by, for example, eliminating all entitlement programs. The programs of the FDR Administration rankle ultra conservatives who are still looking to repeal the New Deal. Failing to fund the Iraqi war, added massively to our debt. The arguments for tax breaks are simple and persuasive. It is your money that you earned, why let the government take it away? Instead of tax and spend, it became borrow and spend. Unfortunately, it is not our money. It is money from China, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Korea and they demand interest. The reality of borrowing escapes the logic and the rhetoric.

Unfortunately, the average American is told that his/her jobs are being taken by “illegals” and we need to stop the flow. Were the flow to stop, wages would rise and plutocrats would fight that until wages fell again. Meanwhile, agitators can blame all this on the “government.” What a wonderful world. In the past couple years, even the word “tyranny” has gained traction at rallies and demonstrations. America is far from tyranny, but closer to uprisings. The behavior has become more enflamed and the rhetoric more combative as well as irrational as people fall from the middle class. Banks gambled and homeowners lost, but the government got blamed instead of banks. Permissive regulation contributed heavily to the gambling, and yet the cry by banking is to remove the few regulations that remain. Profits are literally at an all-time high and yet the Chamber of Commerce and other groups are complaining that the government has too much control. Pundits and commentators take up the chant and the chant becomes a shout: “Throw the bastards out.” As we create more have-nots and engorge the plutocrats we also limit opportunities to educate our citizens. Reducing taxes reduces public education, the historic avenue to improve our lives. Wages are stagnant. Homes are lost. Desperation grows and the stable become shaky while the unstable become explosive. “Kill the government,” forgetting that the government is us. Opponents become enemies. Differences become targets. Shouts become gunshots. Selfishness replaces commonwealth. Death replaces life. Failure is in birth throes.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
15 January 2011

Who/What Do You Think You Are?

2011-01-03T14:37:00.000-08:00

The year’s end often brings up thoughts about fundamentals, and this one is no different. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this odd fact: though we have all kinds of religions and spiritual practices, and though science has brought us insight and evidence about natural processes from the inconceivably huge—the universe, said to have originated 15 billion years ago with a Big Bang—to the infinitely small—particles so puzzling they can hardly be said to have an actual existence beyond a certain probability, yet the whole existence in which we are engaged is still an almost total mystery. Who are we? What are we? We don’t know. We all have beliefs about this; and half-baked ideas from popular versions of science; but when it comes right down to it, we not only don’t know who we are or what we are, but even less about why we’re even here. How we’re even here. Why the human race is even here (sometimes, and often these days, it appears we’re here to fuck up the planet so badly that it becomes unlivable not just for us, but for all else. Even prehistorically, as Edward O. Wilson in The Future of Life says, man, far from being a “noble savage,” was and is “the planetary killer…Eden occupied was a slaughterhouse.”)

But for now, let’s just look at this simple question: Which is primary, matter or mind (sometimes referred to as spirit, soul, etc.)? Science, of course, has few doubts about this. Matter spontaneously generated life (it used to be thought that light energy, a flash of lightning perhaps, was needed to ignite basic chemicals into amino acids; now, much research is focused on life originating in the oceans near the deep vents—sites where exudations of sulfur and heat from the earth’s interior generate anaerobic bacteria, and strange life-forms that require neither light nor oxygen), and from tiny one-celled organisms continued to evolve into more and more complex organisms over billions of years until finally, there was us. In fact, for most of the previous hundreds of years, scientists did not even consider ‘mind’ a fit term to investigate. More recently, though, psychologists and neuroscientists have been looking more seriously into this thing called ‘mind.’ And though they’re still not sure what mind is, or where it’s located, it appears to be some product of matter, specifically the brain, and to have a ‘real’ existence. When it comes to priority, though, most scientists would be adamant: matter comes first. And this has meant, logically, that our era has become the age of materialism. Matter is what matters. All conclusions about origins and purpose stem from that.

Materialism, though, is precisely what many thoughtful people—philosophers, artists, spiritual seekers, religious leaders—find wanting. And so the origin stories that have come down to us from great thinkers and spiritual leaders all put matter secondary to something else: spirit, soul, mind, ideal forms, consciousness, something immaterial. And, that that something immaterial either is or gives birth to mind. In Genesis, God—the great spiritual, eternal being—creates the universe and all in it, including all the various animals and humans, in seven days. God speaks the Word (or is the word), and it is made flesh, or is clothed in flesh. Thus, the breath of some creator God instills life and order into a previously dead and chaotic mess of something, or nothing. And keeps it going. And the task of beings, especially human beings, is to seek to obey and eventually to reunite with that creator God in a more ideal place, an Afterlife. In eastern traditions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, the theoretical base suggests that some sort of Cosmic Mind has priority. From that big mind emerges the forms that are designed to survive in the material world: cells, bodies, and all that drives them from the beginning, mainly desire for increase and security. The task of the human—built as a vehicle for contemplating all of existence, sometimes imaged as the desire of the creator mind to reflect or contemplate itself—is to come to some sort of realization of what is true and real, above and prior to the material self that is secondary and, in some sense, illusory. As Karen Armstrong puts it in the Great Transformation: “The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being. It could, therefore, be discovered in the depths of the self.” It takes most humans several lifetimes to accomplish this; meantime, the imperishable part keeps recycling through life forms (rebirth or reincarnation) over and over. Plato’s image of the cave provides a concrete image for a similar idea. That is, the ideal forms that are primary and eternal for Plato, are not seen by normal beings, who see only reflections—reality reflected by firelight on the wall of a cave. Most humans, that is, see only the physical world, which is changing constantly, and which was created by a demiurge. Though the world he created was based on the eternal forms, it is really only a weak, pale reflection of the true forms. These eternal forms themselves are accessible only to philosophical reason and exalted perception.

It is clear then that two positions are available to us all. Either we consider material existence the be-all and end-all; which is to say that we are born, our brains generate an entity we call mind, we mature, and we die; one shot and that’s the end of it. OR, we are aggregates of some stuff that is really only a pale shadow of a more fundamental reality—a prior and superior mind or soul that we can unite with through the proper rational, behavioral, spiritual, or contemplative practices. Those who subscribe to the first view are sometimes called ‘realists;’ those who subscribe to the second are sometimes called ‘idealists.’ Which are you?

What has given new life to such questions is the emergence, in recent years, of formerly esoteric practices, mostly from the east, coupled with interpretations of scientific developments that appear to provide real-world support for those esoteric views. Consider this quote from a recent book, The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind, Robert Nadeau and Menos Kafatos, Oxford U Press: 1999:

If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that evinces progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts, one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is not unreasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious. (p. 197)

What this interpretation leads to—starting from a wholly materialistic view based in the most materialistic of all scientific paradigms, evolution—is the rather idealistic view that the material universe is actually not dead matter at all; it is alive. It is, in some sense that we are still not clear about, conscious. More, that this universal, conscious whole—that which may have given rise to the idea called ‘God’—“exists in some sense within all [its] parts.” Which is to say, in each one of us.

So what are we? Are we truly separate selves going about our daily lives as best we can—which is to stay alive long enough to reproduce our kind in a way that helps them not just survive, but out-compete all other beings? Or are we interconnected manifestations of some incomprehensible whole, some mind that has not only generated us, but which is within each one of us and thus accessible to our self-reflection?

And how can we tell? What would serve as proof of one or the other position? Is there such a thing as proof; or is there simply belief? And what does it matter?

I would suggest that the view one settles on matters profoundly. For what we believe about who or what we are is the basis for all sorts of decisions about how to act—both towards all other humans (not just those in our tribe), and towards the world as a whole. And it is this that will increasingly, I think, become the crucial matter for all of us.

Obviously, there is more to say about this. Later.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Obama Administration is Dead

2010-12-11T18:52:00.000-08:00

The just-announced compromise between President Obama and gloating Republicans seems to be the final nail in the coffin of the Obama Administration. This guy, to put it simply, seems to have no stomach for a fight at all. Like some modern anti-hero, when the going gets rough, he caves. So today, as he’s been hinting all along, he announced that he would extend the Bush tax cuts for all Americans, including those making over $250,000/year or even $1 million a year (as Senator Schumer proposed.) No, Obama ate the whole poisoned meal, and tried to defend it to outraged colleagues. More than that, he added a couple of new wrinkles. First, he proposed to provide a year’s drop of 2% in the FICA or Social Security taxes that all Americans pay (progressives have proposed making wealthy Americans pay more by extending the amount of income subject to SS taxes, but Obama, predictably, went the other way). While Obama claims that this will put more money in the hands of working Americans (and it will, short term), other progressives have pointed out that it makes a start in a direction favored by the most rabid reactionaries, who have been trying to get rid of Social Security for 80 years. That is, by reducing the amount going into the Social Security Trust Fund (already raided for years by mainly Republican presidents to finance their shitty wars), the President’s action will add to the pressure to bankrupt Social Security to the point where it will be abandoned as too costly. After all, Americans need their military-industrial complex. But there’s another element to the plan as well, again a major cave-in to slavering Republicans and their millionaire constituency. The hated estate tax would be lowered, on estates worth more than $5 million, to 35%. Democrats, Obama’s party, wanted to make the tax 45% on all estates over $3.5 million (still a lowering from the 55% it had been), but again, the Republican plan won.

Sort of makes you wonder if perhaps Obama isn’t a closet Republican, doesn’t it?

Whatever he is—and it certainly is not progressive—it now seems clear that he has decided that his only hope for winning in 2012 is to follow Bill Clinton’s example, and turn to the right after a mid-tern ‘shellacking’. It is a bitter pill for progressives to swallow after the euphoria that greeted his election. It is also, unless I miss my guess, the death knell for his administration. Because the one thing Americans despise more than a loser is a president so weak he can’t even muster the courage to use his bully pulpit to fight for what he believes in. Instead, at every turn, Obama has caved in to conservative forces—whether it’s on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Health Care “reform”, or taxes on the rich. Perhaps he long ago concluded that as a black man, he had to present himself as a non-threatening, non-combative intellectual. But he’s done that, and it has backfired every time. According to Republican rhetoric, he’s a socialist, a communist, a Muslim and a Nazi all rolled into one. Why he thinks he can somehow ingratiate himself with them and their constituency now is a mystery no one seems able to solve. The only thing that appears certain to me, again, is that it—plus his continuing cowardice in confronting his enemies—will condemn him to one term. Given the lack of backbone he’s displayed thus far (and sadly, he has tons of company among his Democratic comrades in Congress), perhaps that’s a good thing.

Lawrence DiStasi