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
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
New Deal Redoux?
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
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
Friday, February 18, 2011
In Case You had any Doubts
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
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
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Genesis of Failure
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
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
Monday, January 03, 2011
Who/What Do You Think You Are?
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
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
Saturday, December 11, 2010
The Obama Administration is Dead
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
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
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Politics Uber Alles
Sail on O Ship of State
Unless it has become too late
To save us from plutocracy
In the name of our democracy
As we edge to immolation
And pick this mighty nation
Apart to little bits
While playing politics
I don’t know about each of you, but I feel that we have reached a point in our democratic republic when we need to reassess the mechanics of governing. For the past two years, The Democratic party has “enjoyed” sizable pluralities in the House and Senate as well as holding the bully pulpit of the White House. The majority did not rule. They were attacked constantly by a noisy minority that has used every technique available to delay, defer, deny or otherwise thwart the will of the people. And here is the rub. We need to protect the minority so that the majority does not simply trample on the rights and needs of a minority that may also have the interests of the nation at heart. The majority perhaps could have been more forceful or even more creative in framing the issues that are at stake, but, save a miracle, the outcome would not have been altered a whit because we are engaged in a partisan struggle of the powerful and wealthy versus the great but shrinking middle class people of our republic.
Interestingly in the latest election, the interpretation of the votes has been made a measure of propagandistic effectiveness instead of fact or reflecting actual opinions and votes. When voters were questioned regarding continuing the tax break for the top 2%, their overwhelming opinion, regardless of party, was that the break for “millionaires and billionaires” should end. Republicans have claimed an entirely different message and have simultaneously called for extension of the tax break and also for reduction of the national debt that will be worsened by $700 Billion over the next ten years if the tax break is extended. So Democrats have used language indicating “millionaires and billionaires” when the actual line is $250,000 for joint returns. That was oversimplification. Millionaires and billionaires would get the break up to $250,000 as well as those who earn less, but Republicans ignored that subtle fact. That is careful word choice. Republicans say that this is not the time to increase taxes on the wealthy since the economy is in decline and that (here we go again) giving the tax breaks to the wealthy will trickle down to the ordinary people and create jobs.
The Bush tax breaks have been in place since 2001 and have not created jobs except in the government sector where about 1.2 million jobs were created and this by the party of smaller government. The private sector gained about 670,000 jobs before the recession. In other words, we proved again that trickle down does not work and that wealthy people do not spend their money where it gets multiplied in the marketplace. The estimate for the multiplication factor for tax breaks for the top 2% of earners is about 9% while the same action for the middle class is about 65% and still higher for folks on unemployment compensation. The claim that we need to rein in spending while splurging $700 Billion on people who don’t need help and who will not improve the job market seems hollow, especially for the additional millions of people who may lose their homes if the unemployment compensation is not immediately extended. There is a claim that small businesses that are not incorporated could be impacted if the Bush cuts are not extended to the highest 2% of income earners, but that, too, is highly suspect since only 1% of small businesses earn more than $250,000 per year. Just who or what is the “Bush break” aimed at? Let me present a theory that you are free to challenge. Republicans are acting as though wealthy people are somehow more worthy because they are wealthy or plutocrats. It is even more ironic that many of these plutocrats don’t pay taxes anyway because they have the wherewithal and tax attorneys to avoid them. The owners of the LA Dodgers, Frank and Jamie McCourt spend an average of $20 million per year and yet have paid pay no income taxes for the past ten years or so. Others may be more socially conscious, but their taxes are gracefully lower anyway. Hedge fund operators pay taxes “earned” at 15% despite huge profits. Surely you would agree that hedge fund investors are more worthy than engineers or schoolteachers or truck drivers, but would engineers, teachers and truck drivers?
Our current tax rates are the lowest since 1950, but in 1950, America's wealthiest 10% held only 30% of the wealth. Today, the top 1% holds about 40% of the wealth. In other words, the share of pie has increased about ten-fold for the truly wealthy. “Trickle down” has actually bubbled up and the only thing that the middle class feels trickle down is the sweat burning down their necks when they cannot pay their mortgages, or maybe a little pee down their legs when their kids go hungry. The middle class has shrunk as though all this were a zero sum game, but it does not have to be zero sum with more enlightened tax burdens. The top marginal tax bracket during WW II was essentially confiscatory at 94%, but citizens felt a need to support the nation at war. Even as late as 1980, the top rate was 70%. In the thirty years since then, the wealth of the richest few has skyrocketed while the income for middle class Americans who are wage earners and not major investors or inheritors, has barely kept up with inflation. Unfortunately, the bottom 10% have not even been able to keep up with inflation. The logic offered by many Republicans is that fairness means that everybody gets the same break. But the question remains, how do we measure equal breaks? Clearly, percentages have not done that job. Many taxes are absolutely regressive. The sales tax affects the poor far more than the wealthy. If your marginal income is at the poverty level and you need a tank of gas or disposable diapers, the local 8 or 9% sales tax may mean cutting down on food or other necessities. For the wealthy it means nothing, sometimes literally, if they have access to corporate sales tax exclusions for their personal use.
We have seen societies in history that were essentially plutocracies and they were often unstable or ruled with an iron fist. The health of a nation is related to the wealth of a nation, but only insofar as the wealth is distributed well enough to avoid great pain or obvious un-merited inequity. As long as we have inequity of regressive taxation on necessities then the income tax needs to be realistic as well as a balancing factor for the perception of fairness. The obvious endpoint of the current trend is a banana republic where a few families control the fates of the remaining families. We can avoid that and can look to addressing inequities by addressing the factors that create the widening gap. Fairness can be measured partly on the ability to pay. Fairness can be measured by reining in costs for things like education that drive innovation and growth for the entire nation. It is in the best interest of the nation to encourage education and to avoid additional regressive burdens such as the newly proposed elimination or reduction of the mortgage exemption or we will quickly shift into a landlord class of great control that will mimic Dicken’s England. It is ironic that this very day, we are celebrating the highest corporate profits ever and yet we have a national average unemployment of 9.8%. We have had constant and consistent productivity growth over the past 30 years and yet fairness in sharing those productivity gains has escaped the workers in both manufacturing and service industries.
Americans are essentially fair-minded. Statesmanship demands fairness and not temporary political advantage. Politics in absence of fairness is not only temporary, it is folly that risks our basic structure. We need to reward those who create jobs that stay in the US and stop using labor costs as a trump card to eliminate good jobs. Incidentally, just look at Boeing. They decided that cheaper labor would save their market for the 787 “Dreamliner.” Boeing is 3 years behind schedule and counting. Cheap overseas labor was no solution and is no solution. Instead of a “Dreamliner,” they got a nightmareliner that will not go away. Obama: use your veto. Travesty will surely follow the right wing capture of the House of Representatives. Class warfare has progressed and the Middle Class is losing.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
05 December 2010
Unless it has become too late
To save us from plutocracy
In the name of our democracy
As we edge to immolation
And pick this mighty nation
Apart to little bits
While playing politics
I don’t know about each of you, but I feel that we have reached a point in our democratic republic when we need to reassess the mechanics of governing. For the past two years, The Democratic party has “enjoyed” sizable pluralities in the House and Senate as well as holding the bully pulpit of the White House. The majority did not rule. They were attacked constantly by a noisy minority that has used every technique available to delay, defer, deny or otherwise thwart the will of the people. And here is the rub. We need to protect the minority so that the majority does not simply trample on the rights and needs of a minority that may also have the interests of the nation at heart. The majority perhaps could have been more forceful or even more creative in framing the issues that are at stake, but, save a miracle, the outcome would not have been altered a whit because we are engaged in a partisan struggle of the powerful and wealthy versus the great but shrinking middle class people of our republic.
Interestingly in the latest election, the interpretation of the votes has been made a measure of propagandistic effectiveness instead of fact or reflecting actual opinions and votes. When voters were questioned regarding continuing the tax break for the top 2%, their overwhelming opinion, regardless of party, was that the break for “millionaires and billionaires” should end. Republicans have claimed an entirely different message and have simultaneously called for extension of the tax break and also for reduction of the national debt that will be worsened by $700 Billion over the next ten years if the tax break is extended. So Democrats have used language indicating “millionaires and billionaires” when the actual line is $250,000 for joint returns. That was oversimplification. Millionaires and billionaires would get the break up to $250,000 as well as those who earn less, but Republicans ignored that subtle fact. That is careful word choice. Republicans say that this is not the time to increase taxes on the wealthy since the economy is in decline and that (here we go again) giving the tax breaks to the wealthy will trickle down to the ordinary people and create jobs.
The Bush tax breaks have been in place since 2001 and have not created jobs except in the government sector where about 1.2 million jobs were created and this by the party of smaller government. The private sector gained about 670,000 jobs before the recession. In other words, we proved again that trickle down does not work and that wealthy people do not spend their money where it gets multiplied in the marketplace. The estimate for the multiplication factor for tax breaks for the top 2% of earners is about 9% while the same action for the middle class is about 65% and still higher for folks on unemployment compensation. The claim that we need to rein in spending while splurging $700 Billion on people who don’t need help and who will not improve the job market seems hollow, especially for the additional millions of people who may lose their homes if the unemployment compensation is not immediately extended. There is a claim that small businesses that are not incorporated could be impacted if the Bush cuts are not extended to the highest 2% of income earners, but that, too, is highly suspect since only 1% of small businesses earn more than $250,000 per year. Just who or what is the “Bush break” aimed at? Let me present a theory that you are free to challenge. Republicans are acting as though wealthy people are somehow more worthy because they are wealthy or plutocrats. It is even more ironic that many of these plutocrats don’t pay taxes anyway because they have the wherewithal and tax attorneys to avoid them. The owners of the LA Dodgers, Frank and Jamie McCourt spend an average of $20 million per year and yet have paid pay no income taxes for the past ten years or so. Others may be more socially conscious, but their taxes are gracefully lower anyway. Hedge fund operators pay taxes “earned” at 15% despite huge profits. Surely you would agree that hedge fund investors are more worthy than engineers or schoolteachers or truck drivers, but would engineers, teachers and truck drivers?
Our current tax rates are the lowest since 1950, but in 1950, America's wealthiest 10% held only 30% of the wealth. Today, the top 1% holds about 40% of the wealth. In other words, the share of pie has increased about ten-fold for the truly wealthy. “Trickle down” has actually bubbled up and the only thing that the middle class feels trickle down is the sweat burning down their necks when they cannot pay their mortgages, or maybe a little pee down their legs when their kids go hungry. The middle class has shrunk as though all this were a zero sum game, but it does not have to be zero sum with more enlightened tax burdens. The top marginal tax bracket during WW II was essentially confiscatory at 94%, but citizens felt a need to support the nation at war. Even as late as 1980, the top rate was 70%. In the thirty years since then, the wealth of the richest few has skyrocketed while the income for middle class Americans who are wage earners and not major investors or inheritors, has barely kept up with inflation. Unfortunately, the bottom 10% have not even been able to keep up with inflation. The logic offered by many Republicans is that fairness means that everybody gets the same break. But the question remains, how do we measure equal breaks? Clearly, percentages have not done that job. Many taxes are absolutely regressive. The sales tax affects the poor far more than the wealthy. If your marginal income is at the poverty level and you need a tank of gas or disposable diapers, the local 8 or 9% sales tax may mean cutting down on food or other necessities. For the wealthy it means nothing, sometimes literally, if they have access to corporate sales tax exclusions for their personal use.
We have seen societies in history that were essentially plutocracies and they were often unstable or ruled with an iron fist. The health of a nation is related to the wealth of a nation, but only insofar as the wealth is distributed well enough to avoid great pain or obvious un-merited inequity. As long as we have inequity of regressive taxation on necessities then the income tax needs to be realistic as well as a balancing factor for the perception of fairness. The obvious endpoint of the current trend is a banana republic where a few families control the fates of the remaining families. We can avoid that and can look to addressing inequities by addressing the factors that create the widening gap. Fairness can be measured partly on the ability to pay. Fairness can be measured by reining in costs for things like education that drive innovation and growth for the entire nation. It is in the best interest of the nation to encourage education and to avoid additional regressive burdens such as the newly proposed elimination or reduction of the mortgage exemption or we will quickly shift into a landlord class of great control that will mimic Dicken’s England. It is ironic that this very day, we are celebrating the highest corporate profits ever and yet we have a national average unemployment of 9.8%. We have had constant and consistent productivity growth over the past 30 years and yet fairness in sharing those productivity gains has escaped the workers in both manufacturing and service industries.
Americans are essentially fair-minded. Statesmanship demands fairness and not temporary political advantage. Politics in absence of fairness is not only temporary, it is folly that risks our basic structure. We need to reward those who create jobs that stay in the US and stop using labor costs as a trump card to eliminate good jobs. Incidentally, just look at Boeing. They decided that cheaper labor would save their market for the 787 “Dreamliner.” Boeing is 3 years behind schedule and counting. Cheap overseas labor was no solution and is no solution. Instead of a “Dreamliner,” they got a nightmareliner that will not go away. Obama: use your veto. Travesty will surely follow the right wing capture of the House of Representatives. Class warfare has progressed and the Middle Class is losing.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
05 December 2010
Wikileaks: An Inside Job?
The news has been alive with alarms about the catastrophe that could result from the latest Wikileaks revelations—over 250,000 cables from the U.S. State Department that could compromise U.S. diplomacy and diplomatic relations for years. Hilary Clinton expressed grave concern about the damage not only to the United States but to the world. The Justice Department announced it would be doing all in its power to prosecute those responsible—chiefly, it seems, Private Bradley Manning, now in custody as the lead, and only suspect in the investigation.
But the real hysteria has centered on those two remaining members of the ‘Axis of Evil,’ Iran and North Korea. Of course, it’s understandable that pooh bahs would be alarmed about North Korea, what with its two recent attacks on the South ratcheting up fears of a renewed all-out war (hard to believe that there has never really been an end to the 1950s Korea “conflict,” isn’t it). Still, the major alarums and trial balloons have concerned Iran. In England’s Guardian, the Nov. 28 headline read: “Saudi Arabia urges US attack on Iran to Stop Nuclear Programme.” The very first sentence adds that “other Arab allies have agitated for military action against Tehran.” These “other allies” include such democratic stalwarts as Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt. All see Iran as a “threat”, as “evil,” or as a “snake.” “Cut off the head of the snake,” Saudi King Abdullah is quoted as urging.
All this was, of course, real music to the Israelis. As prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu was quoted by the Washington Post on Monday Nov. 29, "More and more states, governments and leaders in the Middle East and the wider region and the world believe this is the fundamental threat." Netanyahu went on to expose what he called the “gap” between what Arab leaders say privately and publicly, their public “script” alleging that the “greatest threat is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” while “in reality, leaders understand that this narrative is bankrupt. There is a new understanding,” i.e. the malignancy of a nuclear Iran.
And of course, the American media ran with this as the major story of the Wikileaks revelations. Both the PBS News Hour, with its pundits seriously discussing how bad the Iranian situation is, how unstable its leader, how worried the Arab states are about threats to their own regimes from a rising Iran; and Charlie Rose, where other pundits reviewed the “real” threat of a nuclear Iran (still, by the way, without even a hint of a nuclear weapon, though that no longer matters to the alarmists), and the “consensus” in the Arab states about this (the consensus of the Arab monarchies, at least, most of whom quietly sided with Israel against the Palestinians in the original war in 1948; though Hosni Mubarak of Egypt only jumped on the “throw Palestine to the wolves” bandwagon much later, to maintain U.S. aid and save his dictatorial ass increasingly threatened by popular revolt); in both arenas the ‘experts’ shook their heads gravely as they observed that the time is getting short for someone—Israel or the Obama administration—to do something. And the something was clear to all: someone has to bomb Iran’s still peaceful nuclear facilities.
It was amazing really. Out of 250,000 cables released or soon to be released, the big story was Iran: bomb bomb bomb Iran. No wonder Ahmedinejad, Iran’s president, scornfully dismissed the leaks as U.S. propaganda. But even that was taken as a sign that the man is as totally divorced from reality as his unstable nation.
Until, that is, on November 30, we heard from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to George W. Bush’s first Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Speaking on KPFA’s “Letters to Washington” show, Wilkerson had some fascinating things to say about Wikileak’s latest revelations. First, he said that all the worry about the leaks threatening U.S. diplomatic relations was a “tempest in a teapot.” Diplomats, according to Wilkerson, know that harsh words often get said in private, that governments all try to spy on each other, and that everyone understands the game. What he was really concerned about, he said, was the lack of capability, not to mention supervision of the alleged leaker, Pvt. Bradley Manning. “I have serious difficulty,” the Colonel said, “accepting the fact that this private downloaded what appears to be over a million documents and then gave them to others…Where was his chain of command when he was doing this? when he was downloading thousands of documents?” And then the Colonel came to the real nub of it:
This looks increasingly like (and I’m not a conspiracy theorist) someone is either jumping on top of this, opportunistically, to take advantage of it, or perhaps they were involved in it all along. And why is the information contained in these latest leaks in particular so proof positive of so many things that the United States, or certain parts of the United States, are trying to get across to the public—not least of which is Israel’s threatened position, that an existential threat exists to Israel and Iran is that threat. ‘Look how perilous, look how dangerous this situation is.’ That comes out of these leaks. (emphasis added)
Remember: this is not some ‘expert’ who may or may not have a private agenda with regard to the leaks or the substance of the leaks; nor, as he says, a conspiracy theorist. This is an army colonel, former chief of staff to the previous Secretary of State. This is a man who knows how Washington works, how diplomacy works, how the world of statecraft works. And his chief concern is not the alleged “damage” to the nation’s diplomacy posed by the leaks; it is the twin questions: 1) how did the United States allow this to happen? and 2) was someone taking the opportunity (either by leaping on what was leaked, or actually facilitating the leaks in the first place) to plant disinformation to affirm things they want affirmed?
And what do they want to affirm? It appears that the main objective is to provide further ammunition undergirding the administration’s—driven mainly by Israel and its U.S. lobbies—position that Iran constitutes the greatest threat to world peace since the Soviets, and the increasing justification for a military mission to take that threat out. As Zeid Rifai, the president of the Jordanian senate is quoted as telling a US official: “Bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb. Sanctions, carrots, incentives won’t matter.” Or, as Major General Amos Yadlin, Israel’s military intelligence chief, warned last year: “Israel is not in a position to underestimate Iran and be surprised like the US was on 11 September 2001.”
I have to admit, it never crossed my mind that the Wikileaks cables could be part of a disinformation campaign. Perhaps it takes someone with inside knowledge of how such things work, like Colonel Wilkerson, to get it. But there it is. And my guess is that increasingly, especially as Obama is further harried by Republican zealots howling for his head, the refrain is going to get louder: Bomb Iran now, or suffer another 9/11.
Will the American public go for it? Normally I’d say no. But given what they’ve swallowed recently, and given the fear in this nation, can anyone be sure?
Lawrence DiStasi
But the real hysteria has centered on those two remaining members of the ‘Axis of Evil,’ Iran and North Korea. Of course, it’s understandable that pooh bahs would be alarmed about North Korea, what with its two recent attacks on the South ratcheting up fears of a renewed all-out war (hard to believe that there has never really been an end to the 1950s Korea “conflict,” isn’t it). Still, the major alarums and trial balloons have concerned Iran. In England’s Guardian, the Nov. 28 headline read: “Saudi Arabia urges US attack on Iran to Stop Nuclear Programme.” The very first sentence adds that “other Arab allies have agitated for military action against Tehran.” These “other allies” include such democratic stalwarts as Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt. All see Iran as a “threat”, as “evil,” or as a “snake.” “Cut off the head of the snake,” Saudi King Abdullah is quoted as urging.
All this was, of course, real music to the Israelis. As prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu was quoted by the Washington Post on Monday Nov. 29, "More and more states, governments and leaders in the Middle East and the wider region and the world believe this is the fundamental threat." Netanyahu went on to expose what he called the “gap” between what Arab leaders say privately and publicly, their public “script” alleging that the “greatest threat is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” while “in reality, leaders understand that this narrative is bankrupt. There is a new understanding,” i.e. the malignancy of a nuclear Iran.
And of course, the American media ran with this as the major story of the Wikileaks revelations. Both the PBS News Hour, with its pundits seriously discussing how bad the Iranian situation is, how unstable its leader, how worried the Arab states are about threats to their own regimes from a rising Iran; and Charlie Rose, where other pundits reviewed the “real” threat of a nuclear Iran (still, by the way, without even a hint of a nuclear weapon, though that no longer matters to the alarmists), and the “consensus” in the Arab states about this (the consensus of the Arab monarchies, at least, most of whom quietly sided with Israel against the Palestinians in the original war in 1948; though Hosni Mubarak of Egypt only jumped on the “throw Palestine to the wolves” bandwagon much later, to maintain U.S. aid and save his dictatorial ass increasingly threatened by popular revolt); in both arenas the ‘experts’ shook their heads gravely as they observed that the time is getting short for someone—Israel or the Obama administration—to do something. And the something was clear to all: someone has to bomb Iran’s still peaceful nuclear facilities.
It was amazing really. Out of 250,000 cables released or soon to be released, the big story was Iran: bomb bomb bomb Iran. No wonder Ahmedinejad, Iran’s president, scornfully dismissed the leaks as U.S. propaganda. But even that was taken as a sign that the man is as totally divorced from reality as his unstable nation.
Until, that is, on November 30, we heard from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to George W. Bush’s first Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Speaking on KPFA’s “Letters to Washington” show, Wilkerson had some fascinating things to say about Wikileak’s latest revelations. First, he said that all the worry about the leaks threatening U.S. diplomatic relations was a “tempest in a teapot.” Diplomats, according to Wilkerson, know that harsh words often get said in private, that governments all try to spy on each other, and that everyone understands the game. What he was really concerned about, he said, was the lack of capability, not to mention supervision of the alleged leaker, Pvt. Bradley Manning. “I have serious difficulty,” the Colonel said, “accepting the fact that this private downloaded what appears to be over a million documents and then gave them to others…Where was his chain of command when he was doing this? when he was downloading thousands of documents?” And then the Colonel came to the real nub of it:
This looks increasingly like (and I’m not a conspiracy theorist) someone is either jumping on top of this, opportunistically, to take advantage of it, or perhaps they were involved in it all along. And why is the information contained in these latest leaks in particular so proof positive of so many things that the United States, or certain parts of the United States, are trying to get across to the public—not least of which is Israel’s threatened position, that an existential threat exists to Israel and Iran is that threat. ‘Look how perilous, look how dangerous this situation is.’ That comes out of these leaks. (emphasis added)
Remember: this is not some ‘expert’ who may or may not have a private agenda with regard to the leaks or the substance of the leaks; nor, as he says, a conspiracy theorist. This is an army colonel, former chief of staff to the previous Secretary of State. This is a man who knows how Washington works, how diplomacy works, how the world of statecraft works. And his chief concern is not the alleged “damage” to the nation’s diplomacy posed by the leaks; it is the twin questions: 1) how did the United States allow this to happen? and 2) was someone taking the opportunity (either by leaping on what was leaked, or actually facilitating the leaks in the first place) to plant disinformation to affirm things they want affirmed?
And what do they want to affirm? It appears that the main objective is to provide further ammunition undergirding the administration’s—driven mainly by Israel and its U.S. lobbies—position that Iran constitutes the greatest threat to world peace since the Soviets, and the increasing justification for a military mission to take that threat out. As Zeid Rifai, the president of the Jordanian senate is quoted as telling a US official: “Bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb. Sanctions, carrots, incentives won’t matter.” Or, as Major General Amos Yadlin, Israel’s military intelligence chief, warned last year: “Israel is not in a position to underestimate Iran and be surprised like the US was on 11 September 2001.”
I have to admit, it never crossed my mind that the Wikileaks cables could be part of a disinformation campaign. Perhaps it takes someone with inside knowledge of how such things work, like Colonel Wilkerson, to get it. But there it is. And my guess is that increasingly, especially as Obama is further harried by Republican zealots howling for his head, the refrain is going to get louder: Bomb Iran now, or suffer another 9/11.
Will the American public go for it? Normally I’d say no. But given what they’ve swallowed recently, and given the fear in this nation, can anyone be sure?
Lawrence DiStasi
Monday, November 29, 2010
Social Security Scapegoat
It’s time for the American public to blow a big hole in the proposals now being seriously considered to “solve the budget crisis.” As noted in my last blog, the onus, as always, is meant to fall on the poorest among us. We have been hearing ad nauseam the mantra that the Social Security system is driving the nation into insolvency. Therefore, recent proposals to “solve” the debt crisis—brought on, it should be remembered, by two unpaid-for and unnecessary wars, the Reagan-Bush-Bush reductions in tax income on the wealthy, and of course the outright thievery of Wall Street financiers that produced the housing bubble, and crash—always target Social Security. ‘We’ll all have to make sacrifices,’ is the song line. Which means, you, you poor gullible assholes, will have to sacrifice as usual.
Unless, that is, everyone remembers some simple facts, the first of which is: Social Security is NOT responsible in any way for the current deficits. Indeed, Social Security right now runs surpluses—that is, the money paid in, by workers themselves—outstrips the money paid out. And remember, it’s your money you’ve been paying in for a lifetime. You may recall, in fact, the campaign promises of our presidential candidates a few years ago, who promised that Social Security funds would be “put in a lock box.” What that referred to is the fact that right now, according to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare (www.ncpssm.org ), there is a “$2.6 trillion dollar trust fund built up by American workers over decades.” That’s $2.6 trillion folks. Except for the fact that the federal government, to disguise the deficits it runs each time we have a war, borrows from the SS trust fund, and is thereby obligated to pay it back, with interest. This raiding of the Trust Fund started in 1968 when Pres. Lyndon Johnson got legislation passed—he was building up American involvement in the Vietnam War, and of course wanted to tout “both guns and butter” (their guns, our butter)—started the game. The Trust Fund was allowed to be mixed with the General Fund, and off we went.
Bottom line: not only does Social Security run a surplus, the Federal Government owes the Social Security Trust Fund a ton of money, which it has to pay back with interest. It is in this sense only that Social Security could be said—by a blatant liar—to be contributing to the deficit. A more honest assessment would admit that, in fact, Social Security has contributed to the government’s solvency by supplying it with unused SS funds (the surplus) to disguise its deficits. Is the government grateful? Are the fiscal hawks grateful? Au contraire, mon ami. These bastards resent having to pay all that money back. It will break us! they whine. So let’s kill the goose that lays the golden eggs!
Sounds unbelievable, but that is the proposal coming out of such august bodies as the President’s Commission on Reducing the Deficit, and the Domenici/Rivlin plan referred to in a previous post. Let’s raise the retirement age, cut the COLAs (cost of living adjustments), force seniors to pay more for prescription drugs, and find other ways to cut benefits to the poorest among us. The key thing is to help business! Domenici/Rivlin, in fact, propose giving businesses a one-year Social Security tax “holiday” (we all love holidays, right?) that would reduce government income by $650 billion. It’s not enough that the money-grubbing swine who drove us into this ditch have all been bailed out—with government funds, some of which no doubt came from that SS Trust Fund. Now we have to give them another “holiday” while cutting the pathetic benefits given to the old folks. I tell you, if the American people fall for this one, they deserve to be rooting around in garbage bins to survive.
Fortunately, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare has organized a day of protest. The Committee is calling on all interested parties (and if there’s someone who plans on not getting older, I’d like to hear from him/her) to take part in a day (Tuesday, Nov. 30) of calling Congress and making two demands: 1) NO cuts to Social Security for deficit reduction, and 2) a $250 payment this year to SS beneficiaries in lieu of no cost-of-living increases (COLAs) the past two years. Here’s the number of a hot line that will connect you to your Congressperson’s office: 800-998-0180. CALL, because you can be sure the other side will be shouting their ears off.
While you’re at it, you might want to cast a vote of support for Representative Jan Schakowsky’s plan for deficit reduction. Shakowsky is the only people’s representative on the Deficit Commission, and her plan amounts to getting some budget reductions by such unheard-of expedients as “$144.6 billion in tax increases, $110.7 billion in defense cuts and $17.2 billion in healthcare savings through a public option.” And definitely no cuts in Social Security. As the Huffington Post quoted Shakowsky re: the Bowles-Simpson proposal to cut SS benefits: Using Social Security to address the deficit “is like attacking Iraq to retaliate for the September 11 attacks.”
Of course there are legions of benighted souls in America who would respond: what’s wrong with that? But perhaps there are other legions who get the point. Let us hope so; because as it stands now, the greatest push seems to be coming from the yahoos, who clearly see the current series of shocks (remember the Shock Doctrine?) as their best opportunity to, once and for all, get rid of the most hated of Roosevelt’s “giveaways”: Social Security.
Lawrence DiStasi
Unless, that is, everyone remembers some simple facts, the first of which is: Social Security is NOT responsible in any way for the current deficits. Indeed, Social Security right now runs surpluses—that is, the money paid in, by workers themselves—outstrips the money paid out. And remember, it’s your money you’ve been paying in for a lifetime. You may recall, in fact, the campaign promises of our presidential candidates a few years ago, who promised that Social Security funds would be “put in a lock box.” What that referred to is the fact that right now, according to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare (www.ncpssm.org
Bottom line: not only does Social Security run a surplus, the Federal Government owes the Social Security Trust Fund a ton of money, which it has to pay back with interest. It is in this sense only that Social Security could be said—by a blatant liar—to be contributing to the deficit. A more honest assessment would admit that, in fact, Social Security has contributed to the government’s solvency by supplying it with unused SS funds (the surplus) to disguise its deficits. Is the government grateful? Are the fiscal hawks grateful? Au contraire, mon ami. These bastards resent having to pay all that money back. It will break us! they whine. So let’s kill the goose that lays the golden eggs!
Sounds unbelievable, but that is the proposal coming out of such august bodies as the President’s Commission on Reducing the Deficit, and the Domenici/Rivlin plan referred to in a previous post. Let’s raise the retirement age, cut the COLAs (cost of living adjustments), force seniors to pay more for prescription drugs, and find other ways to cut benefits to the poorest among us. The key thing is to help business! Domenici/Rivlin, in fact, propose giving businesses a one-year Social Security tax “holiday” (we all love holidays, right?) that would reduce government income by $650 billion. It’s not enough that the money-grubbing swine who drove us into this ditch have all been bailed out—with government funds, some of which no doubt came from that SS Trust Fund. Now we have to give them another “holiday” while cutting the pathetic benefits given to the old folks. I tell you, if the American people fall for this one, they deserve to be rooting around in garbage bins to survive.
Fortunately, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare has organized a day of protest. The Committee is calling on all interested parties (and if there’s someone who plans on not getting older, I’d like to hear from him/her) to take part in a day (Tuesday, Nov. 30) of calling Congress and making two demands: 1) NO cuts to Social Security for deficit reduction, and 2) a $250 payment this year to SS beneficiaries in lieu of no cost-of-living increases (COLAs) the past two years. Here’s the number of a hot line that will connect you to your Congressperson’s office: 800-998-0180. CALL, because you can be sure the other side will be shouting their ears off.
While you’re at it, you might want to cast a vote of support for Representative Jan Schakowsky’s plan for deficit reduction. Shakowsky is the only people’s representative on the Deficit Commission, and her plan amounts to getting some budget reductions by such unheard-of expedients as “$144.6 billion in tax increases, $110.7 billion in defense cuts and $17.2 billion in healthcare savings through a public option.” And definitely no cuts in Social Security. As the Huffington Post quoted Shakowsky re: the Bowles-Simpson proposal to cut SS benefits: Using Social Security to address the deficit “is like attacking Iraq to retaliate for the September 11 attacks.”
Of course there are legions of benighted souls in America who would respond: what’s wrong with that? But perhaps there are other legions who get the point. Let us hope so; because as it stands now, the greatest push seems to be coming from the yahoos, who clearly see the current series of shocks (remember the Shock Doctrine?) as their best opportunity to, once and for all, get rid of the most hated of Roosevelt’s “giveaways”: Social Security.
Lawrence DiStasi
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Quantitative Easing, or, The Rich Get Richer
Here’s my favorite take on the elections.
The Federal Reserve and its head, Ben Bernanke, have recently announced their latest initiative, called “quantitative easing.” Aside from the fact that this sounds somewhat pornographic, it apparently means that a central bank creates money ex nihilo, i.e. out of nothing (sometimes called printing money, though these days it’s not so crude; the Fed just magically adds billions to its account), and then uses the funds to purchase financial assets (including government bonds, mortgage-backed securities, and corporate bonds) from regular banks and financial institutions. The Fed, this time, is apparently going to create some $600,000,000,000 (that’s billions), a sum, according to Chrystia Freeland of Reuters, “nearly as big as the TARP. It’s nearly as big as the first stimulus was.”
Now why, you might ask, would the Fed be doing this now. Well apparently, the Fed and most economists really think it’s imperative that the economy get another boost to prevent it from going into a second tailspin. And since the Fed is pretty sure, especially now that the “people” have spoken and swept out Democrats and swept in Republicans (giving the latter control of the House) that there is going to be even worse gridlock in Congress and the White House than before, they have to act. In short, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that this Congress will pass another stimulus, so the unelected Fed has to do it.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The “people,” according to pundits and pollsters, have decided that Obama and the Democrats have spent too much money keeping the country out of depression; the stimulus, in particular, has been rejected as the product of “big spending Democrats.” It’s time to cut back on spending, is the alleged popular message, to get money back to the people. And how to do that: why by putting back into power the Republicans—the very party that crashed the economy in the first place. NO MORE STIMULUS, is the message. And yet, economists agree a stimulus is needed, and so the Fed rides to the rescue. The irony of all this? Listen to Chrystia Freeland:
I think the problem is, when the Fed acts as it does, printing more money, it’s a rich-get-richer phenomenon. This is going to be great for the banks. It’s going to be great for people whose personal finances are strong enough that they can re-mortgage—refinance their mortgages. But it’s not so great for the people who are in trouble. And that’s one reason why it might not have as powerful an impact as the Fed would like.
Now isn’t that sweet? The poor working-class slobs in the Midwest and South (the Tea Partiers) who voted the Republicans into office presumably believed they were voting to help themselves. But by voting for gridlock, they are doing exactly the opposite! They are forcing the Fed to push a stimulus through the back door. And that stimulus, quantitative easing, is going to help the very people—the bankers and financial pirates—voters are supposedly pissed off at. Banks will be infused with tons of money, presumably to induce them to lend to small businesses and households to increase buying. But the banks don’t really have to do that (and all indications are that they don’t want to). Rather, they’ll invest in foreign assets where they can make more profit (have people still not caught on that financial institutions and corporations couldn’t give less of a damn about the USA?). And because there’s a whole lot more money in circulation, it’s going to increase inflation. All of which will help make people like us even poorer. We’ll be poorer, too, because the Fed’s stimulus doesn’t create jobs directly, as another stimulus from Congress presumably would.
Is our democracy not a wondrous thing? It allows damned fools, like the ones who enjoyed victory on Tuesday, the freedom to vote against themselves! While the financiers laugh all the way the bank.
There are other, perhaps more serious global downsides to this latest move of the Fed. But frankly I’m not sure I understand how it all works well enough to explain it. To get some ideas, check out Professor Michael Hudson, “U.S. Quantitative Easing is Fracturing the Global Economy,” at http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21716 ). Meantime, and remembering that “quantitative easing” didn’t work for Japan in the 1990s, enjoy the irony. It may provide the only laughs we get for a while.
Lawrence DiStasi
The Federal Reserve and its head, Ben Bernanke, have recently announced their latest initiative, called “quantitative easing.” Aside from the fact that this sounds somewhat pornographic, it apparently means that a central bank creates money ex nihilo, i.e. out of nothing (sometimes called printing money, though these days it’s not so crude; the Fed just magically adds billions to its account), and then uses the funds to purchase financial assets (including government bonds, mortgage-backed securities, and corporate bonds) from regular banks and financial institutions. The Fed, this time, is apparently going to create some $600,000,000,000 (that’s billions), a sum, according to Chrystia Freeland of Reuters, “nearly as big as the TARP. It’s nearly as big as the first stimulus was.”
Now why, you might ask, would the Fed be doing this now. Well apparently, the Fed and most economists really think it’s imperative that the economy get another boost to prevent it from going into a second tailspin. And since the Fed is pretty sure, especially now that the “people” have spoken and swept out Democrats and swept in Republicans (giving the latter control of the House) that there is going to be even worse gridlock in Congress and the White House than before, they have to act. In short, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that this Congress will pass another stimulus, so the unelected Fed has to do it.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The “people,” according to pundits and pollsters, have decided that Obama and the Democrats have spent too much money keeping the country out of depression; the stimulus, in particular, has been rejected as the product of “big spending Democrats.” It’s time to cut back on spending, is the alleged popular message, to get money back to the people. And how to do that: why by putting back into power the Republicans—the very party that crashed the economy in the first place. NO MORE STIMULUS, is the message. And yet, economists agree a stimulus is needed, and so the Fed rides to the rescue. The irony of all this? Listen to Chrystia Freeland:
I think the problem is, when the Fed acts as it does, printing more money, it’s a rich-get-richer phenomenon. This is going to be great for the banks. It’s going to be great for people whose personal finances are strong enough that they can re-mortgage—refinance their mortgages. But it’s not so great for the people who are in trouble. And that’s one reason why it might not have as powerful an impact as the Fed would like.
Now isn’t that sweet? The poor working-class slobs in the Midwest and South (the Tea Partiers) who voted the Republicans into office presumably believed they were voting to help themselves. But by voting for gridlock, they are doing exactly the opposite! They are forcing the Fed to push a stimulus through the back door. And that stimulus, quantitative easing, is going to help the very people—the bankers and financial pirates—voters are supposedly pissed off at. Banks will be infused with tons of money, presumably to induce them to lend to small businesses and households to increase buying. But the banks don’t really have to do that (and all indications are that they don’t want to). Rather, they’ll invest in foreign assets where they can make more profit (have people still not caught on that financial institutions and corporations couldn’t give less of a damn about the USA?). And because there’s a whole lot more money in circulation, it’s going to increase inflation. All of which will help make people like us even poorer. We’ll be poorer, too, because the Fed’s stimulus doesn’t create jobs directly, as another stimulus from Congress presumably would.
Is our democracy not a wondrous thing? It allows damned fools, like the ones who enjoyed victory on Tuesday, the freedom to vote against themselves! While the financiers laugh all the way the bank.
There are other, perhaps more serious global downsides to this latest move of the Fed. But frankly I’m not sure I understand how it all works well enough to explain it. To get some ideas, check out Professor Michael Hudson, “U.S. Quantitative Easing is Fracturing the Global Economy,” at http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21716
Lawrence DiStasi
Wag the Dog
So many bizarre results from the Republican tsunami in last week’s mid-term elections—which to choose first?
How about this? Pick a target for the United States military to attack—urr, uh, how about Iran?—and see if it flies. Might even be able to convince Obama, now that he’s staggering from his ‘shellacking,’ to use it as a surefire way to get re-elected. You know, the old Wag the Dog scenario, where a weakened president starts a war to galvanize public opinion in his favor (Clinton allegedly did it in Bosnia; Bush clearly did it in Iraq after 9/11). Nevermind that we’re already engaged in two wars in the Middle East. Nevermind that another war would surely raise the deficit to newer more dizzying heights. War works.
Unlikely as such madness might seem to most of us, some recent trial balloons suggest that we should all think again.
For example, Senator Lindsey Graham (one of the so-called Republican “moderates” in the Senate who was flirting with voting for the Health Care Bill) just recently raised the issue of attacking Iran at a security conference in Canada (Saturday, Nov. 6). Asserting that “containment is off the table,” Graham said that war on Iran had several positive components to recommend it: “not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard, in other words neuter that regime.” (Matt Duss, ThinkProgress, 7 November 2010). This is astonishing, not only because countless international observers have opined that such an attack would prove counterproductive—actually leading more surely to a nuclear-armed Iran than anything else (Duss in the above-referenced article cites several of these informed opinions)—but also because it was not that long ago that the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate stated that “not only was Iran NOT working on a nuclear weapon, but it had ended its nuclear weapons efforts in 2003” (see my blog “Iran Again,” June 9, 2008). No matter, the “reasonable” Senator Graham had no hesitation at all in calling for another war against this “great threat.”
He’s not alone. But more subtly than Graham’s, the notion of a military strike on Iran has recently been framed as a great way for President Obama to rescue his tattered reputation in time for the 2012 elections. The ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario. The amazing thing here, though, is that the nation’s oldest and most respected journalist, is proposing the war option. David Broder, of the Washington Post, wrote a piece on October 31 on the eve of the election, titled, “How Obama Might Recover.” Beginning with his august opinion that conventional policy options would probably not work to revive the economy in time since no one can design surefire economic measures, Broder gets to his “inside” advice to the President on one measure that might:
What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy.
Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.
Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve. (Broder, Washington Post, 10/31/10)
Now this is truly bizarre. Broder is no nutball conservative; if anything, he tends toward the liberal end of the spectrum. And yet, here he is, seriously and publicly proposing that the President of the United States start a pre-emptive war with a nation that has attacked no one, in order to rescue his failing presidency and improve the economy. After what we’ve been through in the last ten years with Bush’s pre-emptive wars and the huge hole they put in the nation’s budget (estimates for the Iraq war go as high as $3 trillion! not to mention the cost in death, the drubbing of America’s reputation in the world, and so on), for a respected journalist to seriously offer a plan like this begins to make Tea Party wackos look sane. Broder, of course, is quick to stress that he’s “not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected.” Oh heavens no. But he goes on to close his piece with precisely that suggestion:
But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.
No proof, of course, for his assertion that Iran is, in fact, “the greatest threat to the world in the young century.” Nothing but the uncontested assertion of our senior pundit—and the appetizing carrot to the young president that he will have “made the world safer” and be regarded by history (or at least by Broder) as one of our most “successful presidents.”
How is one to explain such a thing? Has the 81-year-old Broder gone senile? Or is he just listening to a few other pundits who have actually said the same thing recently. Like, for example, the rabidly pro-Israel Elliott Abrams (he of Iran-Contra fame, resuscitated as a ‘National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy’ for Bush) who said recently: “The Obama who had struck Iran and destroyed its nuclear program would be a far stronger candidate, and perhaps an unbeatable one.” Or the equally rabid Daniel Pipes: “a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene.” (both quoted by Eric Alterman, www.americanprogress.org , Nov. 4, 2010). Whatever the source for his loony idea, it is enough to give one pause. And though most commentators on Broder’s lunacy have discounted the fact that it might influence President Obama, we would do well to consider where the president stands with respect to Iran. When he was running for President, he spoke to AIPAC, the America Israel Political Action Committee, a front for promoting even the most right-wing Israeli policies in Washington. As I noted in the above-mentioned blog, what candidate Obama said, at that time, was that he was holding Iran responsible for the rockets launched by Hezbollah on Israel after the latter attacked Lebanon. He added,
we must preserve our total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel by fully funding military assistance and continuing to work on the Arrow and related missile defense programs…(to) help Israel maintain its military edge and deter and repel attacks from as far as Tehran and as close as Gaza.
The Obama administration’s rhetoric excoriating Iran for its alleged nuclear weapons program has only escalated since then.
Is it beyond the realm of possibility, then, that a severely wounded Obama would consider the Broder/Abrams/Pipes suggestion (NB: Jeffrey Goldberg’s September 2010 piece in the Atlantic Magazine, “The Point of No Return,” in which he essentially predicts and rationalizes the fact that Israel will, in the next year, attack Iran itself, may be the mother of all such Israeli-promoted trial balloons; it ends with this quote from Israeli President Shimon Peres: “We don’t want to win over the president,” he said. “We want the president to win.”)?
Given the madness now at large in this nation, it would be folly to think so.
Lawrence DiStasi
=
How about this? Pick a target for the United States military to attack—urr, uh, how about Iran?—and see if it flies. Might even be able to convince Obama, now that he’s staggering from his ‘shellacking,’ to use it as a surefire way to get re-elected. You know, the old Wag the Dog scenario, where a weakened president starts a war to galvanize public opinion in his favor (Clinton allegedly did it in Bosnia; Bush clearly did it in Iraq after 9/11). Nevermind that we’re already engaged in two wars in the Middle East. Nevermind that another war would surely raise the deficit to newer more dizzying heights. War works.
Unlikely as such madness might seem to most of us, some recent trial balloons suggest that we should all think again.
For example, Senator Lindsey Graham (one of the so-called Republican “moderates” in the Senate who was flirting with voting for the Health Care Bill) just recently raised the issue of attacking Iran at a security conference in Canada (Saturday, Nov. 6). Asserting that “containment is off the table,” Graham said that war on Iran had several positive components to recommend it: “not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard, in other words neuter that regime.” (Matt Duss, ThinkProgress, 7 November 2010). This is astonishing, not only because countless international observers have opined that such an attack would prove counterproductive—actually leading more surely to a nuclear-armed Iran than anything else (Duss in the above-referenced article cites several of these informed opinions)—but also because it was not that long ago that the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate stated that “not only was Iran NOT working on a nuclear weapon, but it had ended its nuclear weapons efforts in 2003” (see my blog “Iran Again,” June 9, 2008). No matter, the “reasonable” Senator Graham had no hesitation at all in calling for another war against this “great threat.”
He’s not alone. But more subtly than Graham’s, the notion of a military strike on Iran has recently been framed as a great way for President Obama to rescue his tattered reputation in time for the 2012 elections. The ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario. The amazing thing here, though, is that the nation’s oldest and most respected journalist, is proposing the war option. David Broder, of the Washington Post, wrote a piece on October 31 on the eve of the election, titled, “How Obama Might Recover.” Beginning with his august opinion that conventional policy options would probably not work to revive the economy in time since no one can design surefire economic measures, Broder gets to his “inside” advice to the President on one measure that might:
What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy.
Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.
Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve. (Broder, Washington Post, 10/31/10)
Now this is truly bizarre. Broder is no nutball conservative; if anything, he tends toward the liberal end of the spectrum. And yet, here he is, seriously and publicly proposing that the President of the United States start a pre-emptive war with a nation that has attacked no one, in order to rescue his failing presidency and improve the economy. After what we’ve been through in the last ten years with Bush’s pre-emptive wars and the huge hole they put in the nation’s budget (estimates for the Iraq war go as high as $3 trillion! not to mention the cost in death, the drubbing of America’s reputation in the world, and so on), for a respected journalist to seriously offer a plan like this begins to make Tea Party wackos look sane. Broder, of course, is quick to stress that he’s “not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected.” Oh heavens no. But he goes on to close his piece with precisely that suggestion:
But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.
No proof, of course, for his assertion that Iran is, in fact, “the greatest threat to the world in the young century.” Nothing but the uncontested assertion of our senior pundit—and the appetizing carrot to the young president that he will have “made the world safer” and be regarded by history (or at least by Broder) as one of our most “successful presidents.”
How is one to explain such a thing? Has the 81-year-old Broder gone senile? Or is he just listening to a few other pundits who have actually said the same thing recently. Like, for example, the rabidly pro-Israel Elliott Abrams (he of Iran-Contra fame, resuscitated as a ‘National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy’ for Bush) who said recently: “The Obama who had struck Iran and destroyed its nuclear program would be a far stronger candidate, and perhaps an unbeatable one.” Or the equally rabid Daniel Pipes: “a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene.” (both quoted by Eric Alterman, www.americanprogress.org
we must preserve our total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel by fully funding military assistance and continuing to work on the Arrow and related missile defense programs…(to) help Israel maintain its military edge and deter and repel attacks from as far as Tehran and as close as Gaza.
The Obama administration’s rhetoric excoriating Iran for its alleged nuclear weapons program has only escalated since then.
Is it beyond the realm of possibility, then, that a severely wounded Obama would consider the Broder/Abrams/Pipes suggestion (NB: Jeffrey Goldberg’s September 2010 piece in the Atlantic Magazine, “The Point of No Return,” in which he essentially predicts and rationalizes the fact that Israel will, in the next year, attack Iran itself, may be the mother of all such Israeli-promoted trial balloons; it ends with this quote from Israeli President Shimon Peres: “We don’t want to win over the president,” he said. “We want the president to win.”)?
Given the madness now at large in this nation, it would be folly to think so.
Lawrence DiStasi
=
Undoing the New Deal
The depression was not so Great
And almost nobody ate
Millions had no shoes
Only lawbreakers had the booze
The poverty was grinding
While the nation was finding
A way from the third level of hell
And yet the wealthy did well
In reading the recent biography of FDR A Traitor to his Class by H. W. Brands, lots of interesting facts glared out at me from the pages of the book. Some were related to the personal life of Franklin Roosevelt, but many more were related to the disturbing parallel of the roaring twenties and the depressing thirties to recent times. Foremost among these is that the record corporate profits of today were also the center of the economy of the twenties. In the US, especially, corporations saw record profits as well as reckless speculation in the stock market. Of course, there were differences as well. Only perhaps 15% of the nation was invested in stocks. We now boast of at least 70% participation. Today, we have derivatives that schemers in the 20s did not. Instead of today’s Tea Party extremists and neo-Nazi militia, we had militant Ku Klux Klan and Communist agitators as well as real Nazi sympathizers stirring up hate, discontent and isolationism. Famous people including aviator Charles Lindbergh supported Germany directly and he received a Nazi Medal of Honor presented by Hermann Goering.
Perhaps it is more difficult for folks to peacefully share poverty than it is for them to share the good times. We tend to define differences more sharply in recessions and depressions. During the thirties, blacks were still being lynched, European and Asian immigrants were attacked and humiliated, while today, Hispanic immigrants and Islamic citizens seem to be hated and under attack. Agitation was actually a bit more common then than now with government in the 1920s often supporting ruthless suppression of crowds whether they were unions seeking fair wages or WW I veterans seeking their bonuses promised for service in WW I. In Anacostia, part of the District of Columbia, President Hoover ordered General MacArthur to disperse the 20,000 veterans. He did, brutally using cavalry with swords drawn. The injuries to veterans and the death of an infant in the assault stunned even Hoover who had ordered the action. Child labor in the US was not stopped until 1938 when FDR signed the Fair Labor Standards Act. That was successful largely because adults were competing with children for the same low wages during the depression. A regressive Supreme Court had earlier ruled that children must be given the right to contract for their labor, although they were prohibited from most other contracts. Earlier legislative attempts to force the Supreme Court to respect children in the workplace were fruitless. Our current Supreme Court is not alone in being right wing in makeup. The late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered highly conservative Supreme Courts, similar to today. There was no economic or social safety net except the generosity of neighbors. The American ideal of self-sufficiency was the basis for government policy. The Poor House was the alternative.
Wealth was concentrated in the upper echelons of society to a point not to be seen again until today. Worker productivity until the crash of 1929 was high, however there were problems of sharing productivity gains with workers. That has again occurred with executive salaries and bonuses exceeding a level of 400 times that of the average worker despite record employee productivity. Strangely, the main argument defending harsh treatment of millions of hungry citizens was nearly a verbatim prediction of today’s conservative response to hungry and frightened people of today. “The promise of America is opportunity, not a handout.” Hoover expressed the thought that if citizens were given a handout, it might create a dependence on continued handouts and that people would lose any motivation to work. Today, we have heard almost identical words being echoed by leaders of the conservative elements of the Republican Party as a reason to not extend jobless benefits. Then, as now, politicians resisted unemployment assistance. When a priest in Pittsburgh marched with 12,000 workers to help get unemployment consideration, four were killed in the process. We now know that the conservatives will fight any extension of the unemployment payments to millions of out-of-work men and women. This lack of empathy is cloaked in a “rugged individualism” rhetoric now as it was then and yet they see no connection between their support from government and support of the less fortunate. Coal miners at Matewan, West Virginia were attacked by a detective agency hired by the owners and 12 people were killed. Violence by owners to avoid unions was common and union retaliation became a fact of life. The conservative distrust and even hatred of unions had its beginnings in the New Deal when FDR attempted to level the playing field by encouraging management negotiation with unions. Management did so only under duress and not really until early war production to sell to the British.
The history books are filled with the examples of failed conservative policies that protected the wealthy business owners while government policy was essentially laissez faire with the idea that prosperity was cyclical and that it was all right if some people were hurt or starved in the process of waiting for the cycle to right itself. That was the natural way. The thirties saw the insertion of the Glass-Steagal Act (FDIC, etc.) and Social Security that conservatives even today are trying to eliminate or emasculate by replacing it with defined contributions into privatized stock plans. Can you imagine our individual and family pain and chaos in this current recession if GW Bush had succeeded in replacing Social Security with privatized investment? Maybe you should listen closely to the conservatives, read back to the Great Depression and think hard, because that is our current direction despite the fact that we have the lowest tax rate since 1950 at less than 10% on average. The cry to reduce our deficit caused mainly by two wars of choice may sound appealing, but it is only crying wolf unless the wealthy are willing to give a little to let the real spenders of the middle class help save the republic, its economy and its self respect.
Conservatives are trying to undo the New Deal. To them, regulation is un-American and real freedom is the freedom to hurt everybody except the bankers and large corporations who must be bailed out. The little guy is just that. Little. Big is just that…and too big to fail. What an American concept! Freedom fries the little guy. Freedom gets Big a free lunch.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
10 November 2010
And almost nobody ate
Millions had no shoes
Only lawbreakers had the booze
The poverty was grinding
While the nation was finding
A way from the third level of hell
And yet the wealthy did well
In reading the recent biography of FDR A Traitor to his Class by H. W. Brands, lots of interesting facts glared out at me from the pages of the book. Some were related to the personal life of Franklin Roosevelt, but many more were related to the disturbing parallel of the roaring twenties and the depressing thirties to recent times. Foremost among these is that the record corporate profits of today were also the center of the economy of the twenties. In the US, especially, corporations saw record profits as well as reckless speculation in the stock market. Of course, there were differences as well. Only perhaps 15% of the nation was invested in stocks. We now boast of at least 70% participation. Today, we have derivatives that schemers in the 20s did not. Instead of today’s Tea Party extremists and neo-Nazi militia, we had militant Ku Klux Klan and Communist agitators as well as real Nazi sympathizers stirring up hate, discontent and isolationism. Famous people including aviator Charles Lindbergh supported Germany directly and he received a Nazi Medal of Honor presented by Hermann Goering.
Perhaps it is more difficult for folks to peacefully share poverty than it is for them to share the good times. We tend to define differences more sharply in recessions and depressions. During the thirties, blacks were still being lynched, European and Asian immigrants were attacked and humiliated, while today, Hispanic immigrants and Islamic citizens seem to be hated and under attack. Agitation was actually a bit more common then than now with government in the 1920s often supporting ruthless suppression of crowds whether they were unions seeking fair wages or WW I veterans seeking their bonuses promised for service in WW I. In Anacostia, part of the District of Columbia, President Hoover ordered General MacArthur to disperse the 20,000 veterans. He did, brutally using cavalry with swords drawn. The injuries to veterans and the death of an infant in the assault stunned even Hoover who had ordered the action. Child labor in the US was not stopped until 1938 when FDR signed the Fair Labor Standards Act. That was successful largely because adults were competing with children for the same low wages during the depression. A regressive Supreme Court had earlier ruled that children must be given the right to contract for their labor, although they were prohibited from most other contracts. Earlier legislative attempts to force the Supreme Court to respect children in the workplace were fruitless. Our current Supreme Court is not alone in being right wing in makeup. The late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered highly conservative Supreme Courts, similar to today. There was no economic or social safety net except the generosity of neighbors. The American ideal of self-sufficiency was the basis for government policy. The Poor House was the alternative.
Wealth was concentrated in the upper echelons of society to a point not to be seen again until today. Worker productivity until the crash of 1929 was high, however there were problems of sharing productivity gains with workers. That has again occurred with executive salaries and bonuses exceeding a level of 400 times that of the average worker despite record employee productivity. Strangely, the main argument defending harsh treatment of millions of hungry citizens was nearly a verbatim prediction of today’s conservative response to hungry and frightened people of today. “The promise of America is opportunity, not a handout.” Hoover expressed the thought that if citizens were given a handout, it might create a dependence on continued handouts and that people would lose any motivation to work. Today, we have heard almost identical words being echoed by leaders of the conservative elements of the Republican Party as a reason to not extend jobless benefits. Then, as now, politicians resisted unemployment assistance. When a priest in Pittsburgh marched with 12,000 workers to help get unemployment consideration, four were killed in the process. We now know that the conservatives will fight any extension of the unemployment payments to millions of out-of-work men and women. This lack of empathy is cloaked in a “rugged individualism” rhetoric now as it was then and yet they see no connection between their support from government and support of the less fortunate. Coal miners at Matewan, West Virginia were attacked by a detective agency hired by the owners and 12 people were killed. Violence by owners to avoid unions was common and union retaliation became a fact of life. The conservative distrust and even hatred of unions had its beginnings in the New Deal when FDR attempted to level the playing field by encouraging management negotiation with unions. Management did so only under duress and not really until early war production to sell to the British.
The history books are filled with the examples of failed conservative policies that protected the wealthy business owners while government policy was essentially laissez faire with the idea that prosperity was cyclical and that it was all right if some people were hurt or starved in the process of waiting for the cycle to right itself. That was the natural way. The thirties saw the insertion of the Glass-Steagal Act (FDIC, etc.) and Social Security that conservatives even today are trying to eliminate or emasculate by replacing it with defined contributions into privatized stock plans. Can you imagine our individual and family pain and chaos in this current recession if GW Bush had succeeded in replacing Social Security with privatized investment? Maybe you should listen closely to the conservatives, read back to the Great Depression and think hard, because that is our current direction despite the fact that we have the lowest tax rate since 1950 at less than 10% on average. The cry to reduce our deficit caused mainly by two wars of choice may sound appealing, but it is only crying wolf unless the wealthy are willing to give a little to let the real spenders of the middle class help save the republic, its economy and its self respect.
Conservatives are trying to undo the New Deal. To them, regulation is un-American and real freedom is the freedom to hurt everybody except the bankers and large corporations who must be bailed out. The little guy is just that. Little. Big is just that…and too big to fail. What an American concept! Freedom fries the little guy. Freedom gets Big a free lunch.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
10 November 2010
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
The Eve of Elections
Less than a week before the 2010 midterm elections for Congress, anyone with a soul feels the need to expel some of the indigestion that has been building in the gut. Recent news affords ample material, even if it seems a bit disjointed.
Let’s begin with the types of candidates that are threatening to actually win—even above and beyond the idiots like Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. Consider the lovely candidate threatening to unseat the blue dog Democratic incumbent in North Carolina, Ilario Pantano. Republican Pantano is a 38-year-old veteran of the Iraq war, but what a veteran! He had actually fought in the first gulf war as a marine, but after 9/11 decided to leave his job at Goldman Sachs (where else?) and re-enlist. Serving as a 2d Lieutenant, he was involved in an “incident” in 2004 shortly after the highly-publicized hanging of four American private contractors in Fallujah. As reported in the Oct. 26 Guardian, on 15 April 2004, Pantano and crew stopped two unarmed Iraqi men in a car—suspects, as all Iraqis were. After a car search, he
unloaded a magazine of his M16A4 automatic rifle into them, before reloading and blasting a second magazine over them—some 60 rounds in total. Over the corpses, he left a placard inscribed with the marine motto: ‘No better friend, No worse enemy.’
A few months later, a member of his own unit reported him and he was charged with murder. Other facts emerged: the bodies of the two men, Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Hanjil, were found in a kneeling position, and they were shot in the back. But Pantano’s defense alleged that weapons had been found in the house the Iraqis exited, and the men had “turned on Pantano unexpectedly” as he was guarding them, so he fired in self-defense. It didn’t take long for the charges against Pantano to be dropped for ‘lack of evidence,’ though the officer in charge of the hearing did recommend non-judicial punishment for “extremely poor judgment.” In his campaign, Pantano has refused to defend himself “for something that happened five years ago.” As to the placard he left (which also became the title of a book he wrote, part of the reason for his fame), Pantano has said: “I don’t need to explain anything…If folks are alarmed, well war is alarming.”
Yes. War is alarming. First and foremost for the brutality it rewards—rendering to psychopaths like Pantano hero worship, a book, and now a chance to be a U.S. Congressman endorsed by Sarah Palin (she called Pantano “another dedicated patriot running for Congress”) and Pamela Geller (of ‘mosque at ground zero’ fame, whom Pantano, returning the praise, calls “a patriot” whose endorsement “thrills him”) all in return for his brave murder of unarmed, kneeling civilians. Second, for the brutality it inevitably brings not only to those who take part in it, like Pantano, but to those at home who cannot help but be polluted by its ethos. And this includes not just those in Pantano’s district, which, not unexpectedly, sits only a few miles from the main marine training center at Camp Lejeune.
No. I would include, among others, the sweet man from Arkansas who made the news recently. His name is Clint McCance, and he’s vice-president of the Midland School District in a place called (get this) Pleasant Plains, Arkansas. Allegedly upset over a gay rights group’s “Spirit Day” recently, that urged wearing purple to raise awareness about harassment and bullying of gay youth, Mc Cance commented on his Facebook page:
The only way I’m wearin’ it (purple) for them is if they all commit suicide. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids and die. (Yahoo News, 10/29)
Faced with a firestorm, including, according to McCance, death threats that prompted him to send his wife and children into hiding, the school board VP resigned. He apologized, saying he’s “sorry” for what he wrote on his Facebook page. “I would never support suicide for any kids,” McCance is quoted as saying; indicating that perhaps he’s heard about the rash of gay suicides recently. Isn’t that gratifying? I mean, given the way our politics are going, it shouldn’t be too long before the Tea Party and Sarah Palin are endorsing the very contrite McCance for political office.
As if all this weren’t enough, a recent book and article by sociologist Gar Alperovitz (Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take it Back) puts what looks to be our late, great nation in perspective. You’ve all no doubt heard about how the financial gains of the last 30 years have gone disproportionately to the very rich, while middle class income has stagnated or dropped. Alperovitz points out that the United States now ranks with such advanced nations as Turkmenistan in inequality of income. That is, when measured for income inequality (the gulf between the rich and the rest of us), the United States ranks 77th out of 142 countries—this according to a recent estimate by the United Nations Human Development Report. It is tied not only with Turkmenistan, but also with such bastions of liberty as Tunisia and Georgia. That means that the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. today is more unequal than at any time since the 1920s.
How did this happen? Taxes, for one. Remember the great tax reforms of the Reagan, Bush I and II eras? including a reduction to 15% on capital gains? Well over the last 25 years, “IRS data indicate that the top 1% of American taxpayers increased their share of the nation’s total pre-tax adjusted gross income from 10% in 1980 to 23.5% in 2007.” What’s more, the gain has little to do with individual efforts. Writes Alperovitz:
…not only do income shares of the kind that flow to the top 1% have little to do with what anyone has actually done to deserve them; rather the flows are largely traceable to technologies that ultimately were either paid for by the public, or more importantly, that derive from our collective inheritance of scientific and technical knowledge. (Alperovitz, Huffington Post, 10/28/10)
Now, of course, the Republican mantra is always that ‘lowering taxes frees up capital so that the rich can invest in job-creating businesses’; but what Alperovitz points out is that top marginal tax rates stood at 91% during several Republican and Democrat presidencies (Eisenhower, Truman, etc.) and those high rates “coincided with the postwar boom, the greatest period of economic growth in all of American history.” The shame is that the pusillanimous Democrats of recent years—Clinton, Obama, and the rest, including, this year in California, Jerry Brown running for governor—have echoed this crap about no new taxes. The result (helped by war, of course) has been the devastation of not just the federal economy, but also the economies of most of the states in the union. The prescribed remedy, always, is to “cut spending.” In other words, cut the benefits to the poor and working classes, who will sink even lower relative to the rich already enjoying the lowest tax rates in history.
What can one say? We seem to be wallowing in an era best described by William Butler Yeats in the early part of the twentieth century:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.
The poem, The Second Coming, continues,
Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
But whether its dismal conclusion is apropos now is anyone’s guess:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at least,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Lawrence DiStasi
Let’s begin with the types of candidates that are threatening to actually win—even above and beyond the idiots like Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. Consider the lovely candidate threatening to unseat the blue dog Democratic incumbent in North Carolina, Ilario Pantano. Republican Pantano is a 38-year-old veteran of the Iraq war, but what a veteran! He had actually fought in the first gulf war as a marine, but after 9/11 decided to leave his job at Goldman Sachs (where else?) and re-enlist. Serving as a 2d Lieutenant, he was involved in an “incident” in 2004 shortly after the highly-publicized hanging of four American private contractors in Fallujah. As reported in the Oct. 26 Guardian, on 15 April 2004, Pantano and crew stopped two unarmed Iraqi men in a car—suspects, as all Iraqis were. After a car search, he
unloaded a magazine of his M16A4 automatic rifle into them, before reloading and blasting a second magazine over them—some 60 rounds in total. Over the corpses, he left a placard inscribed with the marine motto: ‘No better friend, No worse enemy.’
A few months later, a member of his own unit reported him and he was charged with murder. Other facts emerged: the bodies of the two men, Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Hanjil, were found in a kneeling position, and they were shot in the back. But Pantano’s defense alleged that weapons had been found in the house the Iraqis exited, and the men had “turned on Pantano unexpectedly” as he was guarding them, so he fired in self-defense. It didn’t take long for the charges against Pantano to be dropped for ‘lack of evidence,’ though the officer in charge of the hearing did recommend non-judicial punishment for “extremely poor judgment.” In his campaign, Pantano has refused to defend himself “for something that happened five years ago.” As to the placard he left (which also became the title of a book he wrote, part of the reason for his fame), Pantano has said: “I don’t need to explain anything…If folks are alarmed, well war is alarming.”
Yes. War is alarming. First and foremost for the brutality it rewards—rendering to psychopaths like Pantano hero worship, a book, and now a chance to be a U.S. Congressman endorsed by Sarah Palin (she called Pantano “another dedicated patriot running for Congress”) and Pamela Geller (of ‘mosque at ground zero’ fame, whom Pantano, returning the praise, calls “a patriot” whose endorsement “thrills him”) all in return for his brave murder of unarmed, kneeling civilians. Second, for the brutality it inevitably brings not only to those who take part in it, like Pantano, but to those at home who cannot help but be polluted by its ethos. And this includes not just those in Pantano’s district, which, not unexpectedly, sits only a few miles from the main marine training center at Camp Lejeune.
No. I would include, among others, the sweet man from Arkansas who made the news recently. His name is Clint McCance, and he’s vice-president of the Midland School District in a place called (get this) Pleasant Plains, Arkansas. Allegedly upset over a gay rights group’s “Spirit Day” recently, that urged wearing purple to raise awareness about harassment and bullying of gay youth, Mc Cance commented on his Facebook page:
The only way I’m wearin’ it (purple) for them is if they all commit suicide. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids and die. (Yahoo News, 10/29)
Faced with a firestorm, including, according to McCance, death threats that prompted him to send his wife and children into hiding, the school board VP resigned. He apologized, saying he’s “sorry” for what he wrote on his Facebook page. “I would never support suicide for any kids,” McCance is quoted as saying; indicating that perhaps he’s heard about the rash of gay suicides recently. Isn’t that gratifying? I mean, given the way our politics are going, it shouldn’t be too long before the Tea Party and Sarah Palin are endorsing the very contrite McCance for political office.
As if all this weren’t enough, a recent book and article by sociologist Gar Alperovitz (Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take it Back) puts what looks to be our late, great nation in perspective. You’ve all no doubt heard about how the financial gains of the last 30 years have gone disproportionately to the very rich, while middle class income has stagnated or dropped. Alperovitz points out that the United States now ranks with such advanced nations as Turkmenistan in inequality of income. That is, when measured for income inequality (the gulf between the rich and the rest of us), the United States ranks 77th out of 142 countries—this according to a recent estimate by the United Nations Human Development Report. It is tied not only with Turkmenistan, but also with such bastions of liberty as Tunisia and Georgia. That means that the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. today is more unequal than at any time since the 1920s.
How did this happen? Taxes, for one. Remember the great tax reforms of the Reagan, Bush I and II eras? including a reduction to 15% on capital gains? Well over the last 25 years, “IRS data indicate that the top 1% of American taxpayers increased their share of the nation’s total pre-tax adjusted gross income from 10% in 1980 to 23.5% in 2007.” What’s more, the gain has little to do with individual efforts. Writes Alperovitz:
…not only do income shares of the kind that flow to the top 1% have little to do with what anyone has actually done to deserve them; rather the flows are largely traceable to technologies that ultimately were either paid for by the public, or more importantly, that derive from our collective inheritance of scientific and technical knowledge. (Alperovitz, Huffington Post, 10/28/10)
Now, of course, the Republican mantra is always that ‘lowering taxes frees up capital so that the rich can invest in job-creating businesses’; but what Alperovitz points out is that top marginal tax rates stood at 91% during several Republican and Democrat presidencies (Eisenhower, Truman, etc.) and those high rates “coincided with the postwar boom, the greatest period of economic growth in all of American history.” The shame is that the pusillanimous Democrats of recent years—Clinton, Obama, and the rest, including, this year in California, Jerry Brown running for governor—have echoed this crap about no new taxes. The result (helped by war, of course) has been the devastation of not just the federal economy, but also the economies of most of the states in the union. The prescribed remedy, always, is to “cut spending.” In other words, cut the benefits to the poor and working classes, who will sink even lower relative to the rich already enjoying the lowest tax rates in history.
What can one say? We seem to be wallowing in an era best described by William Butler Yeats in the early part of the twentieth century:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.
The poem, The Second Coming, continues,
Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
But whether its dismal conclusion is apropos now is anyone’s guess:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at least,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Lawrence DiStasi
God and Country
For god and country sing
So loud that rafters ring
And people loudly pray
For victory in the fray
And to humble enemies
In politics and life
So we may so please
Ourselves with ungodly strife
As we center on the mid-term elections and live through the endless billions of dollars in political advertising, I am reminded of a time when my Uncle Steve returned from WW II and presented our family with a captured Wehrmacht issue leather belt with a silver colored buckle emblazoned “Gott Mit Uns.” “God is with us.” Most of us now see that slogan as presumptive, at best, and yet the attempts to bring God into war and politics never cease. My major objection to the sloganeering is that God does not fight wars or run for office and those who invoke God in their partisan endeavors do not speak either for God or me (or you). This alone may be the leading cause supporting atheism, but it does nothing to advance the cause for humanity. It does seem to assist in the pursuit of ignorance in that we can inject God into the trivial or the bizarre to immunize our lies from inspection or to attack the opposition. In recent weeks, we have witnessed the commingling of images of the Constitution, a deliberately non-sectarian document, with religion to immunize the Constitution itself from analysis and to tie “original language” to some undefined fundamentalist concept that was omitted by the writers.
This political season has resounded with cries of returning to the basics, but with images of violence, political and media programs of intolerance and deliberate violation of the Ten Commandments in other ways such as bearing false witness. Why pretend that God is on our side? If he/she were, then the basics are really twisted and God is more capricious than constant. That is probably not as good a bet as the possibility that some people scam the God thing and pretend that anybody who disagrees is sinful and worthy of condemnation, or stoning or maybe a bombing as a teachable moment.
In the bad old days of yore, the Soviet Union (then officially atheist) claimed freedom of religion. You could have any religion you liked. Unfortunately, you could not simultaneously do so and have a job. Jobs were controlled by the State and only professed atheists could hold jobs. Back in the mid sixties, I was on an assignment in eastern Turkey and visited with the pastor of a church in Diyarbakir that dated back to the early third century. The priest was exasperated because, through social pressure, Christians could not practice their religion and simultaneously hold jobs in a way that reminded me of Russia, but without any official sanction. His parish was down to about a dozen families and failing rapidly despite the many bones and relics in dusty shrines. The Baptist church in town was simply blowing in the wind with a few pigeons roosting on the ledge of a broken window inscribed “Gift of the American Bible Society.” More recently, Christians were murdered in their churches by fundamentalists in Iraq despite “Freedom of Religion” being enshrined in their interim constitution.
Here in these United States, we also profess freedom of religion and yet there are a couple of unique twists here that do not exist in most other modern nations. We seem to mix the religious with the profane in unique ways. It is not unusual in some parts of our country to have a common prayer before a football game or a civic meeting although it is sometimes a silent prayer to avoid embarrassing anyone. I vividly recall praying the Lord’s Prayer in junior high and being extremely conscious of the prayer being the Protestant version and not the one I learned as a young Roman Catholic. It was uncomfortable. I also recall living in the American South and traveling in the rural areas in the early sixties. Billboards and local fliers actually depicted John F. Kennedy as the devil incarnate or as a minion of the Pope who was also of the devil. This was true in Georgia and Alabama and it reminded me that the First Amendment right of free speech was never coupled with the responsibility to be either civil or truthful. In some ways, this was a fear of the unknown for them because Catholics were rare in staunchly fundamentalist rural areas. It was simultaneously frightening and comic. Anti-Catholic/anti-Kennedy billboards were interspersed with the more ubiquitous “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards.
Another twist that makes our nation curiously unique in this blending of religion and life is that politics and power may directly join into an explosive mixture resulting in groups such as the Ku Klux Klan that have shown tremendous negative power in our nation. It is a militancy that is reminiscent of the current Taliban. It is also reminiscent of the strident mixing of patriotism with religion. The result is that unless you personally subscribe to a particular brand of fundamental religion, you may be called unpatriotic, or worse, a traitor, but at least a “Socialist” or perhaps “Nazi.” Once this happens, then the degeneration is complete. We see the ends-means inversion where extremists screaming for liberty have lately physically attacked those who do not agree with either the means or the ends. Fundamentalism then also justifies vile lies in order to reach some ultimate truth. Election season only highlights the phenomenon. It is always with us. Sometimes it is under the surface as when we see hyper-patriots wave the flag a bit too much and sometimes it becomes a full blown assault where God is the club used to beat the crap out of logic and imagined enemies. It is ironic that Jesus is quoted as reminding the Pharisees to separate God and country when he asked “Whose image is on the coin?”
The ugly truth is that when we use God as the point of our spear to impale our enemies, we defile ourselves, our neighbors, and that very God that we pretend to love. It is also ironic that the very same First Amendment to the Constitution that permits all speech, including hateful speech, also prohibits the union of church and state. Reactionaries will demand the union of their fundamentalist beliefs with the state in the same breath. We must join to deny it. In this election, we have seen Tea Party violence against adversaries in isolated cases and we have seen the media glorify the activity. Don’t be fooled. As long as we merge God and Country, there will always be a fundamentalist fringe. Tea Party signs are only recycled hate from other groups and earlier times. It is an old idea with a new name. As for a “return to the basics,” women could not vote and married women could not enter into contracts. Slaves were worth 3/5 of a person for representation. Search and seizure was physical and not electronic. The new burden on our society is to actually read the Constitution and the amendments to embrace them with a discussion of how they apply instead of forging them into weapons to bludgeon our neighbors.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
01 November 2010
So loud that rafters ring
And people loudly pray
For victory in the fray
And to humble enemies
In politics and life
So we may so please
Ourselves with ungodly strife
As we center on the mid-term elections and live through the endless billions of dollars in political advertising, I am reminded of a time when my Uncle Steve returned from WW II and presented our family with a captured Wehrmacht issue leather belt with a silver colored buckle emblazoned “Gott Mit Uns.” “God is with us.” Most of us now see that slogan as presumptive, at best, and yet the attempts to bring God into war and politics never cease. My major objection to the sloganeering is that God does not fight wars or run for office and those who invoke God in their partisan endeavors do not speak either for God or me (or you). This alone may be the leading cause supporting atheism, but it does nothing to advance the cause for humanity. It does seem to assist in the pursuit of ignorance in that we can inject God into the trivial or the bizarre to immunize our lies from inspection or to attack the opposition. In recent weeks, we have witnessed the commingling of images of the Constitution, a deliberately non-sectarian document, with religion to immunize the Constitution itself from analysis and to tie “original language” to some undefined fundamentalist concept that was omitted by the writers.
This political season has resounded with cries of returning to the basics, but with images of violence, political and media programs of intolerance and deliberate violation of the Ten Commandments in other ways such as bearing false witness. Why pretend that God is on our side? If he/she were, then the basics are really twisted and God is more capricious than constant. That is probably not as good a bet as the possibility that some people scam the God thing and pretend that anybody who disagrees is sinful and worthy of condemnation, or stoning or maybe a bombing as a teachable moment.
In the bad old days of yore, the Soviet Union (then officially atheist) claimed freedom of religion. You could have any religion you liked. Unfortunately, you could not simultaneously do so and have a job. Jobs were controlled by the State and only professed atheists could hold jobs. Back in the mid sixties, I was on an assignment in eastern Turkey and visited with the pastor of a church in Diyarbakir that dated back to the early third century. The priest was exasperated because, through social pressure, Christians could not practice their religion and simultaneously hold jobs in a way that reminded me of Russia, but without any official sanction. His parish was down to about a dozen families and failing rapidly despite the many bones and relics in dusty shrines. The Baptist church in town was simply blowing in the wind with a few pigeons roosting on the ledge of a broken window inscribed “Gift of the American Bible Society.” More recently, Christians were murdered in their churches by fundamentalists in Iraq despite “Freedom of Religion” being enshrined in their interim constitution.
Here in these United States, we also profess freedom of religion and yet there are a couple of unique twists here that do not exist in most other modern nations. We seem to mix the religious with the profane in unique ways. It is not unusual in some parts of our country to have a common prayer before a football game or a civic meeting although it is sometimes a silent prayer to avoid embarrassing anyone. I vividly recall praying the Lord’s Prayer in junior high and being extremely conscious of the prayer being the Protestant version and not the one I learned as a young Roman Catholic. It was uncomfortable. I also recall living in the American South and traveling in the rural areas in the early sixties. Billboards and local fliers actually depicted John F. Kennedy as the devil incarnate or as a minion of the Pope who was also of the devil. This was true in Georgia and Alabama and it reminded me that the First Amendment right of free speech was never coupled with the responsibility to be either civil or truthful. In some ways, this was a fear of the unknown for them because Catholics were rare in staunchly fundamentalist rural areas. It was simultaneously frightening and comic. Anti-Catholic/anti-Kennedy billboards were interspersed with the more ubiquitous “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards.
Another twist that makes our nation curiously unique in this blending of religion and life is that politics and power may directly join into an explosive mixture resulting in groups such as the Ku Klux Klan that have shown tremendous negative power in our nation. It is a militancy that is reminiscent of the current Taliban. It is also reminiscent of the strident mixing of patriotism with religion. The result is that unless you personally subscribe to a particular brand of fundamental religion, you may be called unpatriotic, or worse, a traitor, but at least a “Socialist” or perhaps “Nazi.” Once this happens, then the degeneration is complete. We see the ends-means inversion where extremists screaming for liberty have lately physically attacked those who do not agree with either the means or the ends. Fundamentalism then also justifies vile lies in order to reach some ultimate truth. Election season only highlights the phenomenon. It is always with us. Sometimes it is under the surface as when we see hyper-patriots wave the flag a bit too much and sometimes it becomes a full blown assault where God is the club used to beat the crap out of logic and imagined enemies. It is ironic that Jesus is quoted as reminding the Pharisees to separate God and country when he asked “Whose image is on the coin?”
The ugly truth is that when we use God as the point of our spear to impale our enemies, we defile ourselves, our neighbors, and that very God that we pretend to love. It is also ironic that the very same First Amendment to the Constitution that permits all speech, including hateful speech, also prohibits the union of church and state. Reactionaries will demand the union of their fundamentalist beliefs with the state in the same breath. We must join to deny it. In this election, we have seen Tea Party violence against adversaries in isolated cases and we have seen the media glorify the activity. Don’t be fooled. As long as we merge God and Country, there will always be a fundamentalist fringe. Tea Party signs are only recycled hate from other groups and earlier times. It is an old idea with a new name. As for a “return to the basics,” women could not vote and married women could not enter into contracts. Slaves were worth 3/5 of a person for representation. Search and seizure was physical and not electronic. The new burden on our society is to actually read the Constitution and the amendments to embrace them with a discussion of how they apply instead of forging them into weapons to bludgeon our neighbors.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
01 November 2010
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