Culture's Anecdote

Rights vs. Opportunities: The Bell Tolls for Thee

2005-04-20T05:53:00.000-07:00

I'm awake earlier than usual this morning, having been rudely awakened at 6:45 by what sounded like a gigantic swarm of bees on the attack. I got up, put on my glasses, and looked out the bedroom window to see a cloud of dust rising from the parking lot across the street as a crew broomed up the dirt left behind by a John Deere sweeper cleaning up the filth eft from the winter's snow plowing. Shortly after I awoke, Willie, our 3-year-old was crying, awakened, too, by this commercial activity.
Many would say that 7 a.m. is a late hour to be sleeping. But I often stay up late reading because I'm an insomniac. Willie is usually in bed by 10 p.m. and sleeps until 8 or 9 in the morning; he rarely takes afternoon naps as a result. This suits us quite well generally. Dianne gets up about 6:30 when 12-year-old Johnny has school. This week he has a school vacation, so he can sleep later, too, and thus, stay up a little later in the evening. Dianne takes her morning medicine, and sees Johnny off to school, and Willie and I get up later. Dianne often rests in the afternoon.
I bring this up not out of any malice or disagreement with others' lifestyles, but because it represents a certain rudeness that is a result of our fixation on work and business, which at this point transcends any other values. I don't really see any reason to have parking lots in Glens Falls cleaned at 7 a.m. This ain't New York City, and I don't live in a high-rise above the noises of labor and the business hurly-burly.
I understand most people are up by 7 a.m., getting ready for work, or are already at work. Does this mean that since my family and I are in a small minority, that we should have our lifestyle interfered with by the buzzings of commerce?
Apparently, yes.
Bob Herbert wrote a column in the New York Times on Monday in which he praised Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 fourth inaugural address for its visionary `second Bill of Rights.'' I use the Quotes from that address that Herbert used:
``The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
``The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
``The right of every bfarmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
``The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home and abroad.
``The right of every family to a decent home.
``The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
``The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
``The right to a good education.''
Today, Wednesday, reader letters respond to Herbert's column. I am struck by two letters by conservatives who don't agree with Roosevelt's vision of ``rights.'' One contends that Bush's conservatism has properly transformed these ``rights'' into ``opportunities.'' And this conservatism ``includes the right of every person, according to his or her abilities, to convert these opportunities into reality.''
A second flat out contends that these ``rights'' requires others to have to give up their rights: ``Moral intuition does not transform into legal rights.'' In fact, according to this writer, `The change in direction that began under President Ronald Reagan, the change that Bob Herbert so deplores, restored a measure of sanity after the breakdown of individual liberties brought about By Franklin D. Roosevelt's demagogy.''
In other words, according to these conservatives, the rights of business and market forces trump any vision of social fairness and justice. Social fairness is an infringement on the rights of others to eschew any obligation to humanity. As the latter of these two letter-writers puts it, ``Person A may argue that he has a right to food, or housing, or or employment, or health care ... But it does not follow that person B has an obligation to feed or employ him.'' So, we are left with what? Rights end at the rich man's door? If the wealthy have no obligation to the poor, what obligation do the poor have to the rich? Logically, the answer is none. If this is so, then the poor man with no job, no income or housing has the right to simply seize these things, by force if necessary. Survival must trump rights, according to this logical schema. But would those who embrace this ideal agree with this conclusion that logically grows out of their own reasoning? I think not. So where does this leave us?
I quote Hemingway's epigraph from John Donne to ``For Whom the Bell Tolls: ``No man is an Iland, intire of itself; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or thine owne were; any man's death diminshes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.''
Donne did not write that in the age of Reagan, or the age of Roosevelt. He was not a Marxist, but lived long before Marx was a fear in the bourgeousie's soul, in Puritan England, which I assume was not a conducive atmosphere for social concern, since the first Puritans came to New England to establish a theocracy of the elite. (Is there a connection between this economic determinism and the fundamentalist religious ideology? If one is to believe history, then there is.)
When I was young, corner stores and family owned businesses were the norm in the town I lived in. None of the proprietors of these establishments was rich, but they earned decent livings, the type of livings reflected in Roosevelt's address. And to the best of my knowledge, they were content with that. Some of them were more ostentatious in their lifestyles than their peers. But I don't remember a fixation on money, its accumulation and the prestige it brought. Sure, there was an undercurrent of resentment among some of the wealthier business boosters; it was that resentment that fueled Ronald Reagan's ascent to political power shilling for GE, speaking on the virtues of free enterprise and the evil of government encroachment into businessmen's affairs. What troubled them then is what troubled them now, and if they're honest, they'll admit it: they couldn't get richer and amass more of the power that goes with wealth. They believed, and still believe, that their wealth entitles them to deference, recognition of their superiority over other men.
Now that the politics has handed them the power, society is breaking down, and democracy is at risk. Lesser men can vote, but the money decides who the candidates for national office are because running for office costs so much money. Any efforts to counter this fact are decried as ``class warfare'' or an assault on liberty. This protection of liberty furthers liberty for a few. The beloved market forces are nothing more than an excuse for the setting of everything from employment levels to prices for most goods and services by an elite that feels entitled to this power by virtue of ``rights.'' Stock markets drive stock prices; investors, usually elites - for even the mutual fund holders rely on an elite of well-remunerated financial experts to pick the stocks in their funds - demand high returns in the form of dividends and rising stock prices. Employers determine wages; workers can refuse to accept those wages, but face economic hardship if they do so. These market forces are not, then, benign. But if they are in the nature of things, as their promoters insist, then it would seem that the conclusions drawn above about rights and obligations are irrevocable. If the wealthy have the inherent right to their wealth, then the poor have the inherent right to take it from them. And thus, we have the current capitalist jungle that is destroying American society. And we are all, each of us, alone and defenseless. ``Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.''

Interest Rate Conundrum: Twilight for Supply Side?

2005-03-28T09:39:00.000-08:00

I'm no economist. I studied economics in college as a minor, and I'm great at theory, terrible at number-crunching, and I think economic modeling is nothing more than a scientific patina to cover the idiocy of economic methodology and much of contemporary economic theory. This of course leaves my butt hanging in the wind when I write about economics, or criticize the current theoretical orthodoxy. But when I read an economist writing in the New York Times that the government should coerce people into saving money - as one whose name I don't recall did recently in the Business Day Thursday economics column - I usually find myself thinking that we should impose a tax on stupid economic ideas.
Here I go with my heresies again: The last economist who made an important and long-lasting contribution to economic understanding was John Maynard Keynes. Keynes originated the idea that government should intervene when economies flounder, and that government spending could be a powerful economic tool in times of hardship. His ideas came to the forefront during the '30s. (Although Keynes had been active for decades, and predicted after World War I that the Treaty of Versailles imposed such onerous terms on Germany that the settlement endangered the European economy. I don't think that later historical scholarship has successfully refuted Keynes' view.) And while I'll acknowledge that, historically, its hard to gauge the effect of the New Deal on the economy during Roosevelt's first two terms, its absolutely certain that the Keynesian stimulus of war spending in the third term certainly revived the nation's economy. But conversely, when economic conservatives brandishing Supply Side theory assert that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs did the economy great harm with government stimulus, I maintain that that is also impossible to determine because the same Keynesian policies paid for the Vietnam War. Without the war, the Great Society may very well have been successful at combatting poverty without causing the inflation that racked the economy throughout the '70s. And Supply Side theory also ignores the impact oil price changes had in wrecking American living standards. In economist's terms, the '70s inflation was a cost push rather than a demand pull, which the conservatives reject; they assert demand was too high, forcing up price levels. Either way, the '70s opened the door for Supply Side theory, which basically holds that supply of capital is more important than consumption demand, and that increases in supply of capital stimulate investment and job creation, while higher demand only fuels inflation.
One idea that has never taken hold since Supply Side theory became dominant is that Supply Side is by definition an elitist theoretical construct. Or, to put it simply, the sector of society that benefits most from the policy implications of Supply Side theory is the upper class. Assertions to the contrary have consistently been dismissed as ``class warfare.'' But these denigrations of contrary economic theories by Supply Siders does not alter the fact that the largest concentrations of capital are held by wealthy people, and thus the policy benefits of Supply Side fall to the owners of capital. But something very interesting has been happening in the real economic world since George W. Bush - a pseudo-populist who claims to support the aspirations of working people while implementing policies that irreparably harm them - became president.
Tax cuts are central to Supply Side theory, because underlying the capital-formation core of Supply Side is a deep hostility to government intervention in the economy. Supply Side and anti-government ideas march hand in hand to the policy cure all of tax reduction. Since capital formation is more important than consumption, tax cuts should be targeted toward increasing capital formation. But is there a point where there is too much capital?
Lately, Greenspan has been musing about why long-term interest rates are not rising in conjunction with the short-term rates the Federal Reserve Board manipulates. Market forces, according to Supply Side orthodoxy, should force up long-term rates through the pressures on short-term rates. This conundrum, as Greenspan puts it, troubles him. But perhaps rates of return on capital are falling because demand for capital is declining - or at very least, softening. The New York Times' Floyd Norris actually started his column on Friday, March 25, with the statement ``There is too much capital in the world,'' and explains that yields on investment projects are declining. He attributes the increases in mangement compensation in recent years to the redirection of capital because returns on investment are so low. If we assume that Norris is right - that a surplus of capital can distort market values in executive compensation - can we also assume it distort markets that rely on capital for their expansion?
In some parts of the country, particularly in Florida and Southern California, real estate speculation is on the rise, with speculators buying two and three houses or condos hoping for increased valuations when they sell. Is it possible that real estate is an asset class that is increasingly overvalued? (The Federal Reserve has been reversing its low-interest rate policy, but I suspect that one of the factors causing Greenspan to lie awake at night is the effect of higher interest rates on housing. Holders of variable rate mortgages are going to face higher interest rates, and those on the overstretched margins of financial health could face foreclosures. It's going to be harder for bankruptcy filers to keep their homes in the wake of the new GOP bankruptcy laws. Conversely, lenders holding fixed-rate mortgages at low interest rates face declining returns on their holdings. Either way, the financial and housing markets face potential disaster. As, obviously, do the speculators.)
I have thought for some time that there was too much capital in the national economy. I came to this conclusion while watching the Japanese economy flounder despite Japan having real interest rates at zero or lower. The Japanese economy had been mired in recession for years, and the Japanese Central Bank had been reducing rates in hopes of stimulating economic activity. But it wasn't working. If rates can fall to nearly unprecedented levels and not stimulate an economy, is it fair to assume that manipulation of interest rates only stimulates an economy if they fall from a relatively high level, losing bang for the buck at lower levels?
It seems that the American experience in recent years parallels Japan's. Greenspan and the Fed consistently lowered rates after the Wall Street bubble in high-tech stocks burst at the end of 2000. But the economy has merely been treading water ever since. The low rates, coupled with the Republican Supply Side tax cuts, are now weakening the dollar, raising import prices, and inflation clouds are starting to loom. These are not supposed to be the results of Supply Side policy.
Supply Side policies were also in place while America's industrial base was gutted by corporate owners of capital searching for maximized returns on investment as lower wages attracted investment in foreign countries. American corporate capital subsidized both the movement of American jobs overseas and the creation of foreign-owned manufacturing start-ups. Recent reports reveal that textile manufacturers in both Latin America and Africa are falling victim to the Chinese textile juggernaut's textile import expansion - which was fueled by American capital. Thus American capital is now gutting the very industries it created a decade or so ago. American workers are facing a bigger and bigger crunch, as Detroit's automakers are at long last wringing health-care insurance concessions from the UAW. Job creation in America continues, but wages are still falling for most people outside the professional classes.
If Supply Side isn't working - and all the signs are that it isn't - then isn't it time to relegate it to Trotsky's ash-heap of history? Government needs to intervene. But this time it needs to take Keynes' views one step further and force the holders of capital to rebuild America's economic base rather than merely priming the pump. And with a revitalized industrial base, wages and living standards should rise. Dividends are years in the future, but if capital can't maximize rates of return anyway, what difference does that make? It seems to me that's better than watching the world's economy collapse. If nobody can afford to buy them, what difference does it make that the shirts are cheap?

``As If to Breathe Were Life''

2005-03-19T07:42:00.000-08:00

``How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As if to breathe were life ...''

Tennyson wrote those lines imagining the aged Ulysses contemplating age, and the infirmities that accompany it. But not one to give in to these heralds of death, Ulysses, at poem's end, launches himself and those who followed him from the war at Troy through temptation and travail to return to their homes in Greece, sets out ``to seek a newer world.''
``As if to breathe were life.''
I wonder how all the pro-life people would feel if they had to endure the travails of Terry Schiavo and her family. She has been on a feeding tube for 15 years in a vegetative state. ``As if to breathe were life.'' Michael Schiavo has spent a decade trying to find a way to move on with his life - and their children's lives - and allowing his wife dignity. On the verge of reaching some level of closure, fundamentalist religious fanatics and Congressional opportunists decide to insert themselves into what is probably the most agonizing decision any human being could make. But these people, certain of their own self-righteousness, need now to insert themselves in here, while the political leaders they think they single-handedly elect, jump aboard the train to support them, with Tom DeLay, one of the greatest hypocrites in the history of American politics, signing on with calls to prayer on Palm Sunday to defend Terry Schiavo's life. ``As if to breathe were life.''
My wife has an occassionally debilitating illness. We have no idea where this illness will take us. She has told me she never wants to have artificial life support keep her alive. One of my closest friends has an illness that leaves him debilitated much of the time. If he reaches a point where he can no longer do anything, I am sure he would not want these people deciding his future, but would rather leave that up to his wife and children. As it should be. I had to decide whether I wanted my Alzheimer's afflicted parents to be placed on artificial life support, and signed a Do Not Rescusitate order to, in my view, protect them. They have now passed on, and would these people come to me and tell me I made the wrong choice?
Abortion politics, as Jeffrey Toobin noted on CNN Friday, is the real driving force behind all this. We need to promote a ``culture of life,'' the right-wing fundamentalists assert. And tossing their religious views into all this makes unassailable. They are right, and know God's will. Anyone who has other ideas is automatically atheistic and anti-Christian. So any views they hold are irrelevant. Euthanasia and abortion are therefore evil. God wills this.
I knew a man who is a Baptist minister, and we developed a friendship while working together at my former place of employment. We discussed many political issues over lunch, among them abortion. I said to him that I personally would counsel against abortion in most cases, but I was intelligent and wise enough to know that abortions were performed in this country before Roe vs. Wade made them legal. Wealthy women had them performed quietly and in safety while poor women had them performed in back alleys with caustic soda and coathangers, and women, as well as fetuses died, and I needed someone to explain to me what was gained by all that. He listened and thought about what I was saying. I doubt very seriously I changed his mind, but I am certain he understood my point. But Richard was a thoughtful man and I know that, whatever his own views were, he kept an open mind. His final day at work, he told me that when he first saw me, he knew I was a thoughtful man who had many ideas to offer. I graciously and gratefully accepted his compliment.
I wonder what he would make of all this. I've lost tough with him now, but I miss hearing his ideas on many things. Thought is something the soldiers of fundamentalism have eschewed in favor of self-righteousness and the certainty it affords them. But my irritation with them over this issue makes me doubt whether any of them have Richard's humane ability to compassionately explore other's values and ideas.
To these self-righteous hypocrites, who claim they are pro-life but have no compunction about raining bombs and bullets down upon Iraqis, who feel capital punishment is God-sanctioned and have no qualms whatsoever about denying taxpayer aid to poor women who would accept their counsel to give birth rather than abort, and believe that Jesus sanctions their pursuit of mammon's dollars, I say to them in these complex cases like Schiavo's: Go, if you are certain that God is on your side, and perform the miracle that would give this woman back her life. This would also prove indeed that God is on their side and pave the way for a change in people's ways of thinking that would perhaps create the righteous society that God demands they work to create. If they cannot work the miracle, then they should go away and leave these poor people to wrestle with their consciences and God, praying they have made the right choice. (But of course failure to work the miracle would destroy their political foundation, and perhaps, even their faith. Some of them would surely tell me that I blaspheme even making such a suggestion. And perhaps I do blaspheme, but that's between me and God, and does not concern them at all.)
And poor Terry Schiavo, whose husband and parents, who oppose Michael Schiavo's efforts to take her off artificial life-support for religious reasons, battle for her future, is not even aware of the circus that surrounds her twilight existence. Perhaps God has put this circus in place to further His ends. But I doubt God is that cynical. And that lacking in compassion for his Creation, who wrestle with the moral issues life presents us all, and who fervently hope that they do the right thing, but know that uncertainty will dog them all their days.

Is This America or What?

2005-03-17T07:51:00.000-08:00

``There is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.''

So uttered Benjamin Franklin on September 17, 1787, as the original constitutional convention concluded its work. Have Franklin's words proven prophetic 228 years later?
I was taught by my parents - who died poor as the proverbial churchmice, so according to contemporary ideology should have no attention paid to their teachings because if they had been wise and virtuous, they would have died rich - that we should share, and that doing the right thing was its own reward.
The Republican Senate is threatening to change Senate rules to eliminate filibusters on Bush's judicial nominees. Which is probably the first step toward eliminating filibusters altogether, so the Democrats have no ability to stifle Republican legislation. Debate and maneuvering continue on Medicaid reform - less money for health care for the poor - Social Security privatization, oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, and a bankruptcy reform act has been passed which makes it more difficult for people of modest incomes to escape debt because, as the G(reedy) O(ld) P(rigs) prattle about the sacredness of contracts and honoring reponsibility to pay back money borrowed from bankers who loan in good faith with the expectation that borrowers are honorable people who honor responsibility.
As these disputes drag on, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay rakes bucks into a legal defense fund that will help pay his legal bills as he faces a possible indictment from a ``partisan'' Democrat attorney general of Texas who is investigating alleged violations by DeLay of illegally funneling campaign contributions into efforts to redraw Texas legislative districts in favor of Republicans. The House Ethics Committee has been hamstrung by rule changes that prevent a deadlocked committee from investigating ethics violations. (The old rules automatically launched investigations if the three Democrats and three Republicans on the committee deadlocked.)
Meanwhile, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Bush administration has had to acknowledge that a gay gigolo who posed naked for a Web site promoting his business activities was given a press pass to White House news conferences as a ``reporter'' for a Web site run by Bush supporters. This ``reporter'' was a plant that asked Bush and his press staff softball questions phrased to show Bush and his initiatives in the best possible light and cast opposition as obstructionist. Armstrong Williams, it was revealed earlier, had been paid more than $200,000 to promote administration education initiatives in his columns and on his radio show. Special Prosecutor Peter Fitzgerald, meanwhile, gets federal judges to rule that a Time reporter and a New York Times reporter will face prison terms if they don't reveal sources to the prosecutor, who is supposed to be investigating who leaked CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak - that irritaing old Republican hatchet-man hack - after her husband published a piece in the New York Times which blew the whistle on one aspect of the Bush administration's disinformation campaign to launch the Iraq war. Novak himself has apprently never been grilled by the prosecutor's team. I suppose I'm simply being cynical if I ask whether this whole prosecutorial charade wasn't contrived to punish reporters who were unfriendly to the Bush administration.
Topping even this, a report in this past Sunday's Times explores in great detail how the news divisions at local television stations around the country uncritically aired administration video press releases masquerading as news reports. One syndicated agricultural news show, ``AgDay'' actually modified one of these reports, eliminating the reporters acknowledgement that he was ``reporting'' for the Agriculture Department. Obviously, the Fox News-loving White House has arrived at the conclusion that journalism is nothing more than a propaganda organ for the adminstration.
And in my own hometown, a local artist, Esmond Lyons, was paid $3500 for a mural installed in a local school. Among other aspects of the community's history depicted in the work is a demonstrator holding a sign in front of the city's Civil War monument that says ``Blessed Are the Peacemakers Who make Peace.'' Ever since the war in Iraq commenced, a local Vietnam veteran has stood in front of the Civil War monument at a major downtown intersection holding a large sign that says, among other things, ``Support Our Troops. Thank You for Our Freedom.'' The leaders of the school's PTA objected to the artist's creative license which changed the message of the sign, stirring a minor brouhaha. Lyons responded to the demands he change the mural to reflect the actual sign's words, he offered to give the school's money back if it would destroy the entire mural. Some in the community rose to Lyons' support, and the issue is unresolved as of this writing.
I also learned when I was young that a free press and free expression were essential to a free society and that the 1st Amendment quaranteed these liberties. My historical studies tell me that totalitarian states undermine opposition by attacking artists, writers, intellectuals and the press to enhance or enforce totalitarian rule. It seems these assaults on the Democratic opposition by Republicans in the Senate leadership; the attacks on reporters; the dissemination of government approved ``information''; and the assault by small-town PTA women on an artist's right to expression are all of a piece. And deliberately or not, a conspiracy or not, these efforts undermine our democracy. And the motives for these attacks are to silence opposition to government policies and also to silence ideas some find unwelcome. These are steps toward despotism. And once would-be despots begin to get their way, and as opposition to them begins to cave, they stop at nothing. When I read that half of high-school students think that the press should not be free to publish unpopular ideas, as a recent poll revealed, I begin to fear the jackboots.
Another thing my father taught me was that America's Hitler would ride down the streets in a limousine to cheers.

News Roundup Follies and Gambles

2005-03-10T10:13:00.000-08:00

Again, I've had a long hiatus here. But with wife and three-year-old resting, I've got a few minutes.
So here's what's catching my attention.
I suspected that all the right-wing triumphalist crowing about Iraqi elections, Beirut demonstrations, Mubarak's recognition that Egyptian politics weren't monolithic, regional elections in Saudi Arabia (from which women are excluded - we don't want to upset the Wahabbis too much) - were premature at best. Now that Hezbollah hit the streets with pro-Syrian demonstrators and its 20,000 man militia, Bush and Condie backpedalled fast, recognizing that, terrorist group or not, Hezbollah must be dealt with. Once these guys hit the streets, the Lebanese Parliament decided to put the pro-Syrian prime minister back in. Better Syria than civil war? Stay tuned. But democracy in the Middle East is far from a done deal, even in the most cosmopolitan of the Middle Eastern countries, let alone an American-occupied Iraq. Anyone wanna bet that Bashar al-Assad ain't goin' nowhere? Nor the House of Saud? Nor Mubarak? Nor the Iraqi insurgents?
Bush, with his great mandate, seems to be hitting a rutty, pothole-filled highway to Social Security reform and ``permanent'' tax cuts. The moderates in the Senate are heeding that GOP hack Greenspan's long overdue warnings that the deficits are a problem. Hello! A falling dollar is symptom enough that something's wrong in the international financial markets. The trade deficit, soon to be widened further by higher-priced oil imports and more Chinese knit shirts, now that the 1993 WTO deals are allowing an unchecked flow of Chinese imports, is just another brick in the cobbled road to American economic collapse. Can we expect a currency crisis by mid-summer? I wouldn't bet against it. But old Alan still is heeded as the great oracle of the markets. Oh, Great Seer, tell us what is on the horizon? ``I think its a storm, but perhaps the sun will shine if we can use some new smoke-and-mirrors to convince everyone that we're serious about our economic problems. And after all, ignorant MBA's will buy anything as long as it fits the theories we have taught them to have faith in.''
When is someone going to say point-blank that the only thing we need to do to head off disaster is to stop treating the well-heeled rich as an oppressed minority and make them pay their damned taxes! And let's hit the corporations as well. Despite the fact that they hate the very concept of social responsibility, social responsibility still exists.
Hark! I hear pro-Social Security privatization ads proclaiming the looming insolvency of Social Security. When Social Security was implemented, the narrator unctuously intones, there were 16 workers to support every retiree. Now there are only three. Soon, there will be only two. Oh, horrors! The system is going broke! Hey, Chicken Little, where'd all the workers go? To paraphrase the chorus of ``Where Have All the Flowers Gone?':' They've gone to Mexico, and India and China, everyone. ``Oh, when will they ever learn'' indeed. Time to remove the income cap on FICA tax. But it's not fair, I can hear the whining now. I've gone into this before. Let's move along.
Michael Jackson has had to show up for court or he faces a bench warrant. So he arrives in pajamas and slippers, shambling along like some old man, complaining his back hurts. It seems a symbol of the tawdry 80s is now facing his Gotterdammerung. Let's hope that whole spiritually empty, intellectually vacant and morally bankrupt era is, too. Didn't it ever occur to anyone in Entertainment World that there was something wrong with this guy back when he claimed Billie Jean was not his lover? I'm not going to speculate on the motivations of Priscilla Presley and the other bimbo who was dumb enough - or wacko enough - to marry him. But come on!
Pray for Bill Clinton. See ya later.

Ideas, Anyone?

2005-02-17T07:54:00.000-08:00

Bush was just on announcing that John Negroponte, Rusmfeld's Baghdad hatchet man with a long history of dirty deeds, will be the new coordinator of intelligence - or whatever bureaucratic double-speak name these guys have come up with to oversee intelligence gathering.
But the question remains: Is there intelligent life in the Republcan Party?
I started to write ``in Washington,'' but since they lost the election, it seems that the Democrats have decided they no longer have anything to lose. ``The president proposes, the Congress disposes.'' And unless the free market gods can pull off a major propaganda coup, the Social Security privatization plan is dead in the Senate, since Republican moderates broke ranks with the president over the issue. And as Bill Maher put it in an interview with Larry King Monday night, there is no crisis over a system that faces financial problems 37 years from now. And the easy and obvious fix is to make everyone - even right-wing, tax-hating corporate CEOs - pay the same percentage of total income as everyone else. If somebody making $30,000 can pay 6.5 percent, why can't those making $30 million? ``But we won't have incentives! Success is being punished!'' Or: ``We'll never get that money back!!'' Well, if you make $30 million, you don't need a government pension insurance policy. And you can have a party with statues that piss vodka for decorations instead.
And while I'm being tastelessly obstreperous, let's talk about income taxes. There's a simple solution to the tax issue for Democrats, too. Simply eliminate income taxes for people who make less than $50,ooo a year, and not even withhold anything other than FICA from their wages, while their employers still report their wages to the IRS. After this act of economic largess to people who really need ``tax relief,'' why not begin to re-progressivize the tax structure, charging 5 percent on incomes between $50,000 and $100,000, 10 percent on $100,000 to $250,000, 20 percent on $250,000 to $1 million, and 25 percent on incomes above $1 million?
Then tax corporate profits at 25 percent? Treat all income - wages, capital gains and small-business profits accruing to small-business owners - the same? And eliminate all deductions and tax credits except personal exemptions and those for home-mortgage interest on homes valued less than $150,000? And if this isn't ``revenue neutral,'' slap an excise tax on luxury cars, jewelry, yachts and vodka-pissing statues? Tax simplification that helps the working man, crimps accountants and tax lawyers and keeps the government running! How's that for thinking outside the box? Democrats where are you?
Howard Dean ought to be able to turn this into campaign cash from working people who can't contribute to political parties, but now ought to be able to toss a few sawbucks the Dems way. It seems to me the Republicans couldn't oppose such a plan without revealing their true plutocratic instincts.
In other news, Iran and Syria announced that they would work together to oppose any efforts by the U.S. to undermine their sovereignty. The Russians apparently support them in this coalition. Expanded Middle Eastern War anyone?
And, according to the New York Times, Bush is showing signs of compromise on his holy tax cuts as Greenspan scrambles to reassure bullet-sweating foreign central bankers that the U.S. is serious about deficit reduction, since the European Central Bank lost $625 million in value on treasury securities and other dollar holdings as our-market loving government lets the dollar fall in currency markets. On top of this, the Japanese Central Bank - which holds the largest stash of dollar-denominated investments in the world - paarently lost $1.3 billion. (Figures from New York Times editorial on Monday, February 14.)
One of the more interesting currency-market phenomenons in recent years was currency traders turning to Japanese banks to borrow yen at negative real-interest rates and trading the borrowed yen for higher-valued currencies, repaying the yen and keeping the interest-rate differential as profit. A similar strategy could leverage central banks and arbitageurs out of dollars, forcing the U.S. to pay up or shut up on all that foreign debt. This would raise U.S. interest rates, prices of imports - and since we don't make anything in this country any more since corporate America, in its infinite wisdom, genuflecting at the altar of high profits and low wages, decided to gut our industrial base - that means prices on nearly everything, from clothes to food to gas to high-tech electronics. Double-digit inflation, anyone? And worse, yet, massive mortgage defaults, a crash in the U.S. housing market and a collapse of the banking system?
Those tax-cuts for millionaires sure did help our economy, didn't they?
As for John Negroponte, he is personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile and Latin America generally as a former hatchet man for the Reagan war on wicked commie peasants who wouldn't bow before the millionaires and their American corporate string-pullers. Now that we are at war with the disobedient towelheads, he's just the guy to cook our intelligence so we can continue fighting all evil-doing poor people who think it better to die on their feet than live on their knees.
Intelligence, anyone?

Back Again - Hoo Boy!

2005-02-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

After a three week or so hiatus, I'm back.
Explanation: Anyone who thinks taking care of a family isn't time consuming work has never done it.
I'm not complaining, mind you, but two boys and a wife with health problems take up a lot of time.
I admit I got drunk with a pal and watched the Super Bowl - as usual, I rooted for the loser - and read a bit, but sometimes, self-indulgence is a virtue, no matter what Republican Scrooges have to say about work, work, work. But have you ever noticed how dull most of these work, work, work people are? Their singular focus leaves them without a frame of reference to anything but work. As Churchill noted, they have all the virtues and none of the redeeming vices.
Local politics has also taken a bit of my time, through my association with Democracy for America. The elections in Glens Falls aren't until fall, but the local Democracy for America organization has already endorsed a city council candidate. The issue in town clearly is going to be economic development, and there is fertile ground for progressives to sow. There's has been a long standing love among certain elements here in city government for outside consultants to investigate potential avenues of development, and the latest development ideas include traffic rotators - two of them in a block, for God's sake - to keep traffic flowing. Developers are enamored of the idea that growing high-tech development 50 and 60 miles south of here is going to create a demand for new homes and businesses up here, as workers moving into the Albany area's ``tech valley'' are going to live up here and commute. Perhaps. But coupled with this idea is a desire to bring new businesses to the quarter-mile commercial strip downtown, where the city fathers propose to build the traffic rotators to facilitate efficient traffic flow. I thought businesses needed foot traffic in a downtown, aand foot traffic needs to cross streets. Two contradictory ideas make a marriage in Hades, both ideas promoted by developers and consultants who live out of town, and both embraced by current local political leaders.
I think myself that if development is the idea, then the people who live in the community need to have more say in the direction of that development. Thus, the groundwork for progressive politics is opened. I think the impulse to turn to consultants for advice and then embracing their ideas is part and parcel with the MBA mentality that always wants to reach ``concensus'' to avoid individual responsibility and accountability. ``It didn't work? Well, it wasn't all my idea.'' And the idea that business takes precdence over every other consideration is eroding social responsibility. We see evidence of this throughout American life today.
I haven't kept close tabs on a lot of the news lately. Nothing really new has broken out, so we're left with idiotic debates about Social Security privatization - a red herring tossed out by the promoters of drowning big government in the bathtub while looting the national treasury - and national security has suddenly hinged on the Iraqi election, which apparently, if one is to believe the neocons, has demonstrated a thirst for liberty all over the world, with ``tyranny'' on the run. I think one needs to decide what liberty is and what having liberty means. Orlando Patterson, in a trenchant essay in the New York Times, considered what freedom and liberty mean to different people in different parts of the world. In Patterson's view, what he terms as the ``radical privatization'' of liberty in America, in which liberty and freedom are viewed as means to acquire personal power and wealth, are viewed as hypocrisy by much of the world. And Patterson has a point: If liberty is nothing more than acquisition in the pursuit of self-aggrandizement, then liberty loses its meaning for those who lack the means to indulge in such a solipsistic pursuit, and becomes nothing more than a rationale for selfishness. Thus, the neocons' shallow thinking becomes ever more apparent to any thoughful person. Ayn Rand, the pseudophilospher of the solipisism the neocons so revere is exposed as a thinker without a conscience. I personally found ``Atlas Shrugged'' to be one of the most turgidly written, preposterous novels I ever tried to read, giving up in disgust as the plot - such as it was - took a protagonist through a desolate Great Plains to an abandoned factory in the middle of nowhere, whose owner beset by government - i.e. beaureaucratic - interference and taxation closed it down rather than endure the unfair burdens placed upon him by the little people who lacked his vision and talent. Poor Atlas! Poor John Galt, the novel's hero! Poor, poor rich people of great virtue burdened by the demands of inferior slobs who want everything handed to them instead of working and earning it!
The New York Times reported on Super Bowl weekend that newly minted celebrities were handing a business boon to International Harvester by buying five-ton pickup trucks to tool around in; Hummer limousines that held 18 were being chartered to haul rich football fans to the Super Bowl. And woe betide anyone who dares criticize this conspicuous consumption or dares to suggest that if these Atlases can afford this self-indulgence, then they can afford higher taxes to help their society. It's all about me, after all. And this is what all people everywhere should aspire to. Well pardon me if I don't. I read Camus and embraced his existential responsibility rather than Rand's solipsism. Rand may have escaped Soviet Russia, and therefore, in some eyes, this gave her a moral credibility that Camus lacked, but Camus lived through the devastation of World War II and saw firsthand, the sense of personal degradation colonialism and military conquest instilled in subject peoples, unlike Rand, who avoided gulags and subjugation by fleeing to America where her books made her rich and could justify her riches. There is more than a little element of rationalization and self-serving hypocrisy behind all this shallow guff. I contend there's no such thing as a conservative intellectual, only wordsmiths who wish to take on the trappings of intellectualism without the scholarly rigor or humane concern.
I admit my self-indulgence; these people refuse to admit their shenanigans are self-indulgences, and are instead, they insist, just desserts for their morally virtuous selfishness and greed. A society of 300 million people all chasing self-aggrandizement in an endless ``scuffle with the crowd to get their share,'' as Jackson Browne put it in his song ``The Pretender,'' recorded in 1976 as the idealism of the baby-boomers gave way to disillusionment, can hardly be called a virtuous society. It's more like barely controlled chaos. And the rage so many people who consistently vote Republican to express their social, cultural and spiritual dislocation, plays into the hands of the Atlases who oppress them in the name of freedom while handing them an imaginary conspiracy of elites who take away their cultural and economic autonomy. Someday, the light will come on and the anger of these peoples will end up directed at their true oppresors.
When I visited Washington a decade ago now, I eschewed the tours of the White House and the Capital and the Smithsonian and spent nearly a whole day in the National Gallery of Art. More visitors to Washington should take the time to explore this marvelous treasure, which holds as much history, in its own way, as the other attractions. Much of the collection was bequeathed to the country by the Mellon family. (I can hear the neocons screaming now about my hypocrisy in wanting to tax the rich, for without them, this national treasure would not even exist.) At the National Gallery is a large collection of 18th century French portraiture. Naturally, as befitting an aristocratic age, these portraits were of the nobility and the rising bourgeousie who were gaining a foothold in the society of France. And as I looked at the smug, well-stuffed faces in these paintings, I thought, ``Little did they know that the society they were part of was about to be washed away, and many of them were to face the quillotine.''
I may be a hypocrite in admiring and enjoying this monument to the tastes of the wealthy, but I would suggest those who might accuse me ponder the faces in these masterpieces, and the fate that awaited them - a Karmic blowback upon their self-indulgence - and ask themselves whether they or their heirs might not one day face a similar fate.
Which brings me back to development in my hometown. If this development is not supported by a community which feels isolated from the processes which brought it about, then it is all for naught. Some developers may laugh until they piss their pants, but such waste and failure can't help but disillusion the community's people, and fuel more dislocation and outrage.
Could it be that business, not government, is our problem?

Reinauguration Follies

2005-01-21T07:20:00.000-08:00

I don't watch much TV news. The corporations control it all; the liberal media elite lost its grip years ago. Conservatives just need that myth because if it weren't true, then their legitimacy is questionable. So I have no idea what television did with Bush's second inaugural, and get my news from the print press, especially the New York Times, not beause it's not corporate, or that it's liberal, but because it's relatively reliable, and written for people with brains.
I also see AP dispatches in local papers. And while there's no doubt the GOP and the Bush's had their nice triumphalist party, it appears that the opposition got a few licks in. I was most amused with Barbara Boxer's assault on Condoleeza Rice's impregnable fortress of rectitude. With her integrity impugned, old Condi pulled a Clarence Thomas and complained about an unfair attack on her integrity. She didn't drag out the line about a ``high-tech lynching,'' but it was almost as good, wheeling out the ``I'm-insulted-that-anyone-would-question-my-honesty'' routine. Well, lady, after the masterpiece of disingenuos buck passing you handed the 9/11 commision last summer, blaming bureaucracies for any snafus before and after the attack on the Trade Center, I think its time for someone to question your credibility, and by implication, the credibility of the Bush administration generally. It's unfair to attack us, the Bush people insist.
But with facts in hand, there's something more fundamentally unfair here: It's unfair to send American troops into battlefields under false pretenses; its unfair to undermine the public's confidence in programs like Social Security to serve an ideological agenda; its unfair to transfer wealth from the lower rungs of society to reward those who already have more than enough. Yet anytime these liars are caught in lies, and get called on them, they put on this ``how-dare-you'' act. And while nincompoopian pea-brain Americanus no-mind might buy all this, it doesn't change the fact that these people are liars. Joe Biden piled on by telling our Secretary-of-State-to-be that her facts are simply wrong, and she ought to start being honest. None of this of course will convince more than a handful of Democrats to vote against her confirmation - Republicans would see she was confirmed anyway - but at least someone finally had the courage to call a liar a liar.
Conservatives refuse to accept facts. The liberal-media-conspiracy myth, the Social Security crisis, the rhetoric about promoting freedom by invading Iraq, the refusal to see the corruption Republicans have been wallowing in since Nixon, the self-serving rationalizations of contemporary Christian fundamentalism - Christ died to redeem my sins so I am forgiven, and if my actions are any indication, I can continue sinning - as exemplified in ``The Passion of the Christ,'' all testify to the refusal by too many Americans to accept reality. It's almost as if these people had to acknowledge the way things really are, their psychic and spiritual moorings would come undone and they couldn't survive. Mark Danner in the January 13 New York Review of Books explores this phenomenon in ``How Bush Really Won.'' He recounts attending a Bush campaign rally in Orlando. He sat next to a woman he describes as ``well-educated, worldly -- a doctor and a two time Olympic gold medalist in women's softball'' who turns to him and says, ``Do you believe Kerry said that?'' She was alluding to Kerry telling the New York Times that terrorism was a nuisance, as misreported by the rest of the corporate media. Danner tells her what Kerry really said, but she ``listened to me intently,'' Danner writes, ``nodded politely, began to form a question, and then, thinking better of it, looked at me a moment longer before turning back to the President. She'd had a choice what - or rather whom - to believe; and she'd made it.''
So America's myth must become reality or these people will not know what to believe. Belief must trump fact.
In corporate America, one must only believe the orthodoxy, have a positive attitude and anything can be done. And if it doesn't happen, we pretend it did, say it did, and voila! we made our own reality. (Which is basically what a Bush operative told the New York Times in an earlier Sunday Magazine article. We act upon the world and change reality.)
And thus Bush's second inaugural address: ``There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and the tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom ... We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands ... So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.''
How do you define tyranny?
Our 12-year-old is probably going to end up on Ritalin for ADHD. While this hasn't been diagnosed yet, it's pretty certain that it will be. John has had a hard time in school, and can't seem to focus on details or his assigned homework and household tasks. Ritalin has no doubt helped many children lead better lives. But somewhere in here, there's something that troubles my wife and I both about this. The education system today, like every other sector of society, has been heavily bureacratized. The system has little problem dealing with the mass distribution of the bell curve, but has a difficult time with exceptional students. Medication may help John get some focus back, but who also benefits from this diagnosis? Obviously the school does: Teachers have an easier time (and I'm the last one to excoriate teachers, who do have a very difficult, sometimes thankless, job); administrators get another student through the system with good test scores. And digging deeper, something else emerges. Each child with this type of problem takes a pill and the problem is gone. In some way, each of these children is a nonconformist, willfully or not. So with each pill, a little more of the human pageant of diversity disappears. In the end, the system creates another good cog for consumerist corporate capitalism. All my life, I have valued nonconformity and am a nonconformist. So has my wife. Why wouldn't we want our children to hang on to that precious commodity of nonconformity? It seems that the mission of schools is to fulfill the needs of society. Currently, education reform has equated society's needs with the needs of commerce. We need men and women who can perform the tasks of business. And a competitive world needs people to keep their noses to the grindstone or America will be eclipsed; America might no longer be top dog in the world.
If such a thing were to happen - which is inevitable, it seesm to me - no empire lasts forever - then the Manifest Destiny of America, the shining city on the hill myth, collapses.
9/11 brought to the surface a profound crisis of confidence to the surface. We cling to the myths because they are all that altogether too many Americans have to cling to. It's all of a piece: Condoleeza Rice's integrity; Bush election victory and second inaugural address; my stepson and Ritalin; the schools need for conformity to supply the needs of business. But nowhere in all this is anything resembling spiritual peace. Can anyone stop for five minutes and hear the chimes of freedom - freedom being independence of thought and action, not just capitalism's chimeras - and hear the voice of God in a work of art or the stars? It was said of communism that it sought to make all men equal by making all men slaves. I sometimes think that, if all the facts are known, that corporate capitalism - conformist, orthodox, reactive rather than proactive, valuing loyalty over talent and honesty - seeks to make all men free by making all men slaves.

Taxes, Social Security and Liars

2005-01-16T08:23:00.000-08:00

Conservatives start from the premise that government hinders economic growth and infringes on the liberty of the citizen. Their conception raises commerce above all other freedoms. Government interference in commerce is by defintion an evil. Simply put, government is evil, businessmen are good.
I begin from exactly the opposite premise: Businessmen, with their endless greed and lust for power, do not serve the best interests of society as a whole, and their venal instincts pose a clear and present danger to the liberty of the vast majority of citizens. Government is the way society curbs these men's excesses and channels their impulses into activities that better society as a whole and improve the standards of living of all. In a word: businessmen are evil, government is good.
Businessmen and their apologists in the economics profession maintain that the highest standard of living for all arises from business activity. But I think the American experience of the last 30 years or so proves exactly the opposite: As government has rolled back the taxes and regulations that constrain business, the living standards of working people have grown increasingly straitened. How have I arrived at this heretical conclusion? Life experience and informed observation of the American scene for 20 years. The lower classes work two or three jobs to pay for the basic amenities of life - housing, food, clothing, and for most, a car. The jobs that paid the best wages have fled the country, replaced with lower-wage work. And while capital markets have seen an unprecedented boom, enriching holders of capital, most people barely have the money to survive, let alone save. To the well-heeled who contend that all can participate in an ``ownership'' society based on capital possession, I ask what do they recommend poorer people do? Tell the children they can't eat tonight because mommy and daddy have to save money. We have to live in crappy little apartments and dress in rags because money must be saved not spent?
Ah, the conservatives reply, this will encourage these children to struggle and work harder to have more. Are they sure this will work? They assume that men are rational beings, and reason dictates this outcome. But how can people with educations that are mediocre at best - because the majority of these young people live in neighborhoods afflicted with the pathologies of poverty - learn reason, when everything around them seems unreasonable and unfair? The life experience of the well-heeled cannot even begin to prepare them for understanding the experiences of those in the lower reaches of society. Their hectoring lectures about reason and virtue fall on deaf ears, if they fall on the ears of the poor at all.
I spent nearly 20 years of my life working in corporate America. In the early years of that tenure, I devoted my efforts to helping build a company that began just a few months before I began working for it, saw that company absorbed into a larger corporate structure, labored on the technologies that were being implemented to enhance it, came up with ideas to manage that organization that were adopted by management. But after six years, I had received the only promotion I ever got, and was impicitly made to understand that my volatile personality was not suitable for professional advancement. What was my sin? In large part, it was telling the truth as I saw it, and not suffering fools gladly. I got visibly upset when things I held important were trampled upon, and when orders I disagreed with were handed out by men and women who lacked the skills to implement them, and thus could not understand the long-term implications of those orders, I balked. These were deemed qualities inappropriate for leaders. But was this purloining of ideas and exploitation of my intellectual capital ethical? And were they in the best interest of the organization, which now finds itelf in serious business difficulties, managed by men and women who follow the by-the-book orthodoxies handed down from top mangement in a city 1000 miles away?
This ethical question cuts to the heart of all these issues, for we see this lack of integrity spilling over into every realm of society. And the current political scene is driven by it.
I had C-Span on TV as I was preparing my family for bed last night as my wife had a flare-up of the illness akin to multiple sclerosis that often leaves her all but incapacitated, and a Heritage Foundation yakathon featured the author of a book whose portentuous title - which I have forgotten - places it in the ranks of the seemingly endless propaganda screeds blathering about the lack of contemporary moral values that the right-wing loves to foist on the public, who stated unequivocally that any businessman whose business was having problems could not possibly say so publicly ``or he would be out of business.'' So quite simply, he must lie about it. The end - staying in business - justified the means - in this case, lying. And this is considered ethical behavior.
Bill Clinton lied about an extramarital affair, and the conservatives publicly pilloried him for it, reveling in every salacious, sordid detail of it, but if they lie to preserve their business, they are doing something ethical. Talk about situational ethics!
This tortured reasoning is paraded before the public as the epitome of virtue. Why? Because money and business trump everything. If applied to the proper situation - one approved of by conservative ideals - I prefer the term ideology - then mendacity becomes virtue. Nietzsche's ``transvaluation of values'' becomes conservative ethos. Mendacity has its purposes, that are redeemed by the ends to which it is applied.
Thus, mendacity in the service of conservative values becomes virtue. We are at war in Iraq as the result of lies, but the war is virtuous because it battles a dangerous enemy, so the public is told - terrorism. And now, after tax cuts have once again come to the aid of the wealthy to foster economic growth that most people outside the professional community of businessmen don't benefit from, the public is having foisted upon it ``Social Security privatization,'' with dire warnings of economic apocalypse if Social Security is left as it is. The system will go broke soon, we are told, even though the Social Security system's own actuaries cast doubt on this ``fact.'' As Paul Krugman and - to their credit, many in the economics profession - point out, this crisis is being manufactured for conservative ideological ends - the destruction of a program conservatives have hated since its inception, and have repeatedly trumped up phony crises about in efforts to undercut it. It is, in fact, the most successful New Deal program, providing a modicum of dignity to elderly people and families with disabled breadwinners and their caregivers. Why? Simply because they are absolutely certain that government is bad and businessmen are good. But even this is only a cover for what really troubles them. This system transfers a certain amount of political power from the upper classes to the masses. The most telling criticism the conservatives wielded against Roosevelt was that the New Deal made him a ``traitor to his class.''
It also made him one of the most far-sighted poltical leaders in American history. And it gave the American people a check on the abuses of the greedy upper class. And this is why Social Security must be destroyed. It checks the power of the wealthy, who have equated freedom with money, particularly their money. But if money is the engine of freedom, then more money in the hands of the lower classes brings greater freedom. This is what the engineers of Social Security reform are banking on to allow them to foist ``the ownership society'' on everyone as they deliberately, out of their own short-sighted greed, refuse to allow the lower classes to have - a stake in the society of which they are part, except on the terms the wealthy and powerful promote. This is why I was denied promotion in corporate America, and this is why the economy of the conservative revolution has failed to benefit all too many people. The wealthy want it all, and on their own terms. And all this under the mendacious guise of promoting freedom.
It's time to call liars, cheats and thieves, liars, cheats and thieves.

Propoganda, Language and the Death of Cool

2005-01-11T08:04:00.000-08:00

After a rather long - and unplanned - hiatus from this, I am now back and hope to stick to a schedule. But unlike good bourgeouis lives, mine tends to come undone at the drop of a hat. To those who can plan every day down to the last detail, more power to you. But my life doesn't fit that mold. And while that makes life difficult sometimes, difficulties can also be interesting.
That said, I need to rant. (Perhaps that need is a great motivator.)
I had to go but me wife a new coffee maker Friday afternoon, and I took Willie with me to the mall, bought some DVDs and the coffee maker, and came home. When I got here, Dianne was on the phone talking to an erstwhile friend of mine who moved his family to Tennessee several years ago. But our friendship was unusual, beginning in college and lurching through a few years beyond that. Steve was more conservative and Republican in his views than I was, and when we were in college I gave some credence to his Reaganite views on some issues. But we diverged in our views over time as the ``Conservative Revolution'' became more solipsistic, less tolerant and less honest, and more reactionary.
The last time I talked with him was shortly after ``9/11'' and by the end of our conversation was accused of always blaming America for the world's problems, and I hung up rather pissed off. Discussions with conservatives always seem to preclude reasonable discussion and a fair assessment of the facts and end up pure ideological confrontation, and I tire of this. Although these tirades from the right always end up the fault of the ``liberals.''
Thus I approached the phone conversation with trepidation and grimace.
We started off congenially enough, asking about family and life generally. He offered a few interesting ideas about tax reform and social security, but the explicit statement that liberals need to give up on the income tax or face constant defeat politically because Republicans can keep hammering them with it set the tone for more to come. Liberals wanted bureaucrats to tell everybody what to do; people were tired of liberals telling them how smart they are; the Democrats were hated down South because all the Democrats leaders were trial lawyers who lived off the misery and misfortune of others. It was like trying to carry on a dialogue with Rush Limbaugh. When I pointed out that corporate America - that bastion of market forces that are the bulwark of everything in conservative America - are nothing but beauracracies themselves, and started noting that my own experience of 20 years living in the belly of that beast, having my ideas stolen and implemented without any recompense, promotions or acknowledgement was a result of my persona and attitudes, I'd had about enough. Yes, going along to get along is not my forte, but somewhere along the line things like integrity have to have a place. It's unethical for people to steal ideas and not give credit where credit is due. Pure and simple. I should not have been ``smart,'' apparently, and more deferential. Conformity and unquestioning deference to authority lead to concentration camps. This is a lesson that vthe 20th century should have clearly taught the world. But somewhere in conservative paradise, the light never came on in the attic. And this lack of fundamental honesty seems to have taken hold in all areas of our society.
A couple of nights earlier, I attended the monthly Democracy for America MeetUp - I've been involved with the organization since it was Dean for America - and watched a video by George Lakoff, a Berkeley professor who has been writing for a few years now about how Republicans use language to frame issues to their benefit. This is clearly accurate. Lakoff caught Howard Dean's attention with is thinking and has been selling quite a number of copies of his book, ``Don't Think of an Elephant,'' which analyzes this approach, and advocates Democrats following a similar approach. This may or may not hold a key to future Democratic success, and Lakoff's views on how to use Republican issues to our advanatge by turning taxation into a patriotic issue, and refusing to use Republican terminology when debating them have merit. But something about all this bothers me. The Republicans have become masters of propoganda by using language disingenuously - ``Tax Relief,'' ``death tax,'' ``War on Terror.'' But if Democratic success is going to hinge upon equally disingenuous use of language, then we are adopting the fundamental dishonesty behind Republicanism and further muddying the waters.
This is no small thing. If people use language to avoid talking about reality in clear terms, then fundamental honesty is undermined even further. And, really, isn't that part of how we got into this mess? From the euphemisms of political correctness to the linguistic somersaults of right-wing propogandists like Limbaugh, to advertising's greedy drumbeat, we are, as a nation, awash in disingenuousness. And we can no longer have honest discussions about anything. Everything has come down to who has the best linguistic cover. If we can't use language honestly, without fear or favor, how can we be honest about anything else?
Is corruption our only future? God help America.
I was watching the annual New Year's Eve TV festivities. Dick Clark wasn't around to watch the ball drop in Times Square. Apparently, old Dick is not well - age is taking its toll on the eternally youthful TV empressario. While I'm not one to really mourn Dick's aging or eventual demise, he has long been someone who, at least superficially, had his pulse on the changing image of hipness. So instead of Dick, we got Regis Philbin, who is about the epitome of unhip. Old Regis is too unhip to even be square. Hip has always been the exact opposite of mainstream. It has always depended on the outsider who sees through the cant, and has the audacity to say the emperor is naked. Hipness has always been about this risk-taking, this honesty, this audacity. And when Regis Philbin is trotted out as an emblem of what is preeminent in popular culture, its quite apparent that hip is in serious danger of expiring. The final blow to cool for me was watchinh Colin Powell stand beside Michael Bloomberg as the ball fell. Powell may have been one of the very few people in the current presidential adminstration who appreantly tried to tell our honesty-challenged MBA president something besides what he wanted to hear. But in serving in an adminstration that used wishful thinking and propoganda to encourage a solipsistic people to go war, he has irreperably sullied his reputation. And as young people danced to corporate-manufactured music, he becomes a symbol of the corruption rotting our truculent, fearful, dishnoest society.

Cultural Authenticty, Cultural Phoniness

2004-12-29T15:37:00.000-08:00

The death of cultural critic and novelist Susan Sontag brings to mind some musings on the nature of culture, and the current cultural condition of America, that I think also sheds some light on the political divisions the country has confronted for a couple of generations, reflected in the current Red State/Blue State divide.
For those who aren't aware of Sontag's work - which is probably more people than the cultural mavens of the urban areas would think - she was one of the key counterculture thinkers of the 60s, along with Norman Mailer, and her precursors, the Beats. She spent most of her life in New York City, and from there she wrote extensively on the contradictions and discontents of modern culture, and the dichotomy of highbrow and lowbrow. While I haven't read her myself, the noises coming from the New York cultural elite - particularly an obituary and appreciation in today's New York Times - cast a probably unintended light on the problem of cultural authenticity.
The retrospectives center on an essay titled ``Notes on Camp,'' which focused directly on the dichotomy between highbrow and lowbrow culture. ``The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly on refinement,'' the Times quotes the essay. ``The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy ... Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated ...''
As someone who enjoys both highbrow and lowbrow - Beethoven and Beatles, Kurosawa and Jackie Chan, John Ford and Jean Renoir - I understand her point. At the time she wrote this in the early 60s, the intellectual class was in the midst of a massive reappraisal of taste as rock transformed popular music into high art and the Beat aesthetic reached the mainstream at last, and Sontag's musings were a welcome argument in favor of the broadening of highbrow tastes. But this very broadening was only made possible by the countercultural aesthetic in the first place, it seems to me. The Beats rebelled against the mainstream while embracing the Modernism of jazz and Joyce; the rebellion of popular music that rock 'n' roll ushered in was a rebellion against the conformity of the 50s. With Bob Dylan's appearance on the scene, these two aesthetics merged. Dylan's folk songs and rock songs were cantaknerous and challenging, and they laid down a challenge to both lowbrow and higbrow that spread over into the politics. If Modernism could embrace abstraction to such an extent that the masses couldn't grasp it - which Joyce had clearly done, just as the Beboppers had - then there was no reason why lowbrow culture couldn't be embraced by the higbrow. If the political activism that came of age with the recuitment of the traditional intellectual classes into the civil rights movement and the free-speech movements, then there was no reason why this intellectual and political commitment couldn't spill over into the mainstream. Which, for a time it did.
But this expansion led to a contraction of cultural and political expansions among the very groups that this convergence sought to draw in - the lower and middle classes. For a time, the challenge thrown at the larger society was embraced, but excesses of behavior - drug-taking, sexual experimentation - came to alienate the middle classes, which ultimately destroyed the dream of expanded vision. Why?
For me, in middle age, the 60s were about a greater challenge laid down to the society as a whole. The expansion of political rights challenged long-held preconceptions among conservative middle Americans who had a stake in preserving an older order. In their minds, it was one thing to work to break the hold of segregation and bring an excluded and oppressed minority - blacks - out of their oppresion. It was something else again to let their expanded opportunities begin to infringe upon the traditional social structures though busing. Feminism and gay rights were seen as further encroachments on traditional structures. The whites who now saw black children bused into their schools, or saw their children bused into inner-city schools, and who saw these new liberation movements as a threat to their way of life, religious faith, and ultimately, their cultural foundations, had no alternative but to balk.
In the arts, the more hedonistic styles of rock and the lifestyles they thrived on - sexual libertinism and drug-induced alternate states of consciousness - were embraced hedonistically, but the more pretentious ideas of alternate worldviews never really clicked. And as the hedonism claimed several of the new cultural leaders by drug-related deaths, and sexual liberation bred jadedness and, with AIDS, became a potentially deadly lifestyle, the veneer wore off, and the culture retrenched.
And there was another issue emerging here as well. What was authentic experience, and how was authenticity determined? Who was to say that the experience of conformist, middle-class culture was less authentic than that of the rebel, the outcast, the nonconformist? I think its safe to say that the embrace of the outcast and the nonconformist was just another cultural fad, at least for the masses. And as with all cultural fads, times change and the next generation moves on to something else. By the early 70s, the Beatles were gone, and they no longer could serve as a unifying factor in popular culture. They were genuinely greater than the sum of their parts. Many who revered John Lennon's personal depth and political engagement were less attracted to Paul McCartney's breezy light-heartedness. By the mid-70s, marginally talented nonentities like Peter Frampton were selling more records than the solo Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones combined. Who then was authentic? To Frampton's legions of fans, there must have been something in him that attracted them that a Bob Dylan fan simply could not grasp. The Humpty Dumpty of the counterculture had obviously fallen off the wall.
And as the acknowledged ``authentic'' leaders of the counterculture disintegrated artistically and personally, and as the social divide widened, the nation also found itself growing increasingly polarized politically. Hipsters who disdained Bob Dylan but loved disco no longer had a common cultural language with Eagles fans; the mainstream that became embittered and alienated from the activism of the new liberation movements no longer had common political goals. And the entrepreneurs of concert t-shirts and drug sales became the entrepreneurs of legitimate business, and their youthful attitudes gave way to a rejection of governmental action, fearing its ability to constrain their entreprenurial instincts. After all, one of the central rallying points of the countercultural 60s was freedom for each to pursue his interests unhindered. If business became your overriding interest, then governmental action through regulation and taxation was a constraint on freedom. Taking this reasoning further, governmental action to further the interests of the newly liberated or those seeking liberation could be seen as an infrigement on the traditional rights of those who rejected these liberation movements, and saw them as an explicit threat to their worldview.
So here we are, 30 and 40 years on, polarized again. Some still ponder the meaning of authenticity. For me, the question of cultural authenticity is central to our larger questions. If Britney Spears is authentic even in the extremity of her willfull artifice, does the idea of authenticity have any meaning at all? Is Alan Jackson as authentic as Johnny Cash? Is John Mayer as authentic as Bob Dylan? Is George W. Bush as authentic as, say, John F. Kennedy? Or Howard Dean? Is Jessica Simpson's lip-synching as authentic as Bruce Springsteen's singing? How you answer these questions says absolutely nothing about the meaning of the very idea of authenticity, but says worlds about how you approach life and the world. And it is that question that stands at the center of American life today - cultural, political and social.
Is there any common ground at all? And if not, can any common ground be reclaimed?

News of the Year

2004-12-21T08:06:00.000-08:00

It's a tradition for journalists to do a top-news-stories-of-the-year story, so I thought I'd do one. But my top stories aren't the election, the Iraq misadventure, or hurricanes in Florida, nor is my ``Man of the Year'' George Bush or Osama bin laden. Time magazine's criterion for choosing the Man of the Year is based upon the change the choice wrought, for good or ill, in that year. I would add that the impact on the future is even more important.
For me the most important developments in the world today are ongoing stories of global economic change with potentially disastrous consequences for the United States. And while I can't pretend to understand all the implications of these developments, I am certain that the changes they are ushering in hold the potential to determine the future course of the global economy for much of the 21st century.
And the machinations of American policy makers are helping determine the fate of the American economy. And I am pessimistic about the final outcome.
First, recent developments in Russia are the harbinger of these changes. It was clear to me that Amerian policymakers in the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush were wrong in thinking the breakup of the Soviet Union into a new structure of independent states would permanently weaken Russia, was wrong, suspecting that this breakup was going to inspire revanchist sentiments among Russian leaders at some point. Boris Yeltsin's benign persona misled not only Bush pere's advisors, but Clinton's as well, into thinking that Russia was going to be a lesser power for some time into the future. They forgot a simple rule of international politics - that political leaders at the highest levels conduct international affairs in the best interest of the state they head. In the early years of post-Soviet Russia, it was apparent that the collapse of Soviet authority necessitated appeasement of the Western powers as Russia struggled to regain its equilibrium. This automatically implied waiting for opportunities to enhance Russia's international credibility. And sure enough, the terrorist attacks in the United States and the unrest in Southern Russia and in certain resource-rich former Soviet Republics supplied those opportunities.
Putin responded to the opportunities by convincing a foolish American leader that his intentions were benign while moving to crush breakaway insurgents in Chechnya; help former Soviet Republics quell dissent; and work to regain control, if not outright nationalize, the industries crucial to his success in reestablishing Russian power - which from the outset had to have been a goal of his presidency - the energy industries and the media.
While Putin has suffered a temporary setback in his efforts to reassemble the empire with his failed bid to help Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma choose a Russian-friendly successor, he has been highly succesful in bringing the once-independent energy giant Yukos under state control, defying an American court and Western creditors by apparently contriving to sell Yukos assets at auction to a shell company, allowing Gazprom, an energy company the Russian overnment owns controlling interest in, to gain additional time to put together funding to purchase the Yukos assets, primarily its natural-gas division, to settle tax debts owed to the Russian government.
This growing Russian power poses a threat to American interests because it leaves long-term direction of the Russian energy industry in the hands of the Russian state, which now controls huge oil and gas reserves in Central Asia. If instability spreads in the Middle East in the wake of Bush's misguided Iraqi incursion - which in my mind is almost certain as Bin Laden begins to turn his attention more and more to his ultimate goal, the destruction of the House of Saud - whoever holds the strongest hand in the energy game holds the future of much of the world economy. This is power. And power over the world's oil is sliding away from the U.S.
Which brings me to China. Here too, developments are sliding out of U.S. control as American policymakers look for an easy solution to regaining America's dominance of the international economy and soldifying American corporate control and advancing the interests of the American plutocracy. Bush's tax cuts have fueled gigantic debt, which is being funded by foreign investors, at this point largely China and Japan. The gamble is that the more American debt China holds, the more China is at the mercy of American economic demand. But this is an extremely risky gamble. At some point, economic pressures within China itself will force the Chinese government to offer more incentives to labor, and create a larger domestic market for consumer goods. At this point, the capital stored in American securities will have to be used to keep China's economy afloat as these domestic demands force a restructuring of China's economy. The United States at that point, it seems to me, will have to offer higher prices to Chinese manufaturers to keep the supply of goods flowing from China to the U.S. If the U.S. fails to pay higher prices, the debt held by the Chinese becomes their economic security as they liquidate it. If the the U.S. pays the higher prices, U.S. domestic prices will rise.
Lately, there are signs that foreign investors are growing reluctant to invest in U.S. Treasury debt indefinitely. They may be starting to buy larger numbers of U.S. equities, perhaps as a hedge against the Treasury debt. A falling dollar looks good if inflation is rising in the United States, as interest rates rise and other currencies benefit from the dollar's fall. China, with its currency pegged close to dollar parity, will be able to use its huge dollar reserves to support its economic expansion while the American standard of living drops.
Between Russia's growing control over world energy resources and China's hold on American securities, Lenin's prophecy about capitalism, even with communism a dead ideology, may be coming true. Lenin is said to have contended that if the capitalists were given enough rope, they would hang themselves. When someone asked Lenin where enough rope could be gotten to hang the capitalists, he replied, ``They will sell it to us.''
The Bush administration, and a large segment of the American populace, seem determined to sell China the rope it will hang us with.

How to Ruin a Happy Morning

2004-12-17T07:43:00.000-08:00

I'm a familiar site on the streets of Glens Falls, walking with my three-year-old Willie to the library or bank or local stores. I'm an overweight fifty-year-old with a beard, and Willie's a little red-headed tot in, for winter, a blue-hooded jacket. We stroll around every day when weather's decent, and take cabs when the distances are long or the weather's bad.
Willie likes to go to the library, just as I did when I was a boy. The local library has a couple of ladies who tell stories and read books for preschoolers a couple of times a week, and Willie loves to go hear the stories and play with the other little ones. After this week's Storytime, I had to go to the bank, and took Willie to Burger King. When we finished lunch, I needed to go to the local K-Mart to get my stepson some winter boots - sneakers really, with somewhat higher tops and a look more like boots rather than ``athletic shoes'' - and we walked to the cab stand to catch a cab to the outskirts of town, where K-Mart resides, a giant parking lot with a building that stands atop a former cow-pasture and site of a long-gone strip-joint. (The locals, after the indulgences of the 70s, got on their values hobby-horse and made a stink about vice and naked bimbos, and chased it out of town. As if men inclined to indulge such entertainments are going to be reformed by running strippers out of town.)
In any event, I caught a cab at one of the two cab stands on South Street - one of Glens Falls' glories, where beer and booze flow freely, the unemployed and homeless gather and free entertainment is to be had for the price of a New Way hot dog - and as is my custom, climbed in the front seat next to the driver, holding Willie as he stands to watch his world go by through the windshield - a clear violation of child-protection in loco parentisism implemented by politicians who must appear to be doing something while completely ignoring the real problems the country faces - and joking with the driver.
As we turned the corner on the route out of town, a siren blared behind. The driver pulled over. I asked what was going on, and she said, ``I don't know,'' but as the siren's source pulled up behind us, added ``Uh-oh, it's Kevin.'' She rolled down the window and a hatless, brown-shirted (I'm not kidding!) Warren County deputy sheriff pointed at me, and barked loudly, ``Do something with the Kid!'' As I climbed into the back with Willie, he continued to rudely bark at the cab driver.
As we pulled away after this Gestapo-like intervention into our misbehavior, I joked to the driver that he lived up to what we used to call cops when we were young. (For those to young to recall, 60s radicals and hippies called them ``pigs.'') She knew this particular enforcer of the peace, and told me he was from West Glens Falls, which is something like being from Dogpatch (Oops! showing my age again!). ``Ah-Ha!'' I said. ``White trash punk makes good and pushes his weight around. I got it.''
I'm not saying I wasn't breaking the law. Nor am I trying to justify myself by claiming I think that particular law is an unnecessary intrusion into individual liberties, both mine and Willie's. I realize in an accident, Willie might be injured, and this doting father would come apart at the seams if anything happened to him. But there needs to be an element of choice in these situations. When I was younger, and a hippie wastrel, I went to biker parties with friends, and one of the bugbears of bikers is helmet laws. And I always felt that if these guys wanted to ride motorcycles at 100 miles an hour and crash into things, smashing their brains out by not wearing their helmets, that was their choice. When I was young, there were very few cars with seatbelts - nobody used them anyway - and car seats were unheard of. Millions of us survived the 50s and early 60s without all that. If someone chooses to use car seats and restraints to keep their children safe, I have no problem with it. And perhaps I should use them. But its the state-enforced coercion I object to. And usually, these types of laws are passed by liberals at the behest of liberal activist groups who seek to do good, but their efforts to do good end up alienating a large segment of the public. This is certainly one of the reasons for the conservative political ascendancy. The talk-radio guys got their start taking libertarian positions on issues like this one, attracting an alienated audience that felt the government was intruding on every aspect of their lives. This is part of what draws them to Republicans. And this habit of finding dubious problems in need of government intervention is a habit progressives need to break if they are ever going to get the country back to addressing the real progressive issues that matter.

Local Party Flap Reflects Weird Values

2004-12-16T17:40:00.000-08:00

- By Walter H. Combs, TMPress-United News & Press Features

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether to laugh or cry at what gets into newspapers, both large and small.
My local paper has a front-page story about an e-mail sent to the local high-school principal which contained photos of students drinking at a party, which somehow found its way to the paper and to parents of students in the district, which has stirred up some hornets. It seems that parents thought the party was chaperoned and objectionable activities wouldn't be going on. But even chaperones can't be everywhere, and if a couple of kids sneak some nips from a bottle or a flask, well ... kids are kids.
The problem isn't kids being kids, or chaperones not being alert - if indeed the `party' was chaperoned - but why is there such a furor over all this. One parent is quoted in the paper as wanting `a pep walk' because apparently the father knew some teens were drinking at the party. Let's drag the poor man before the judge and humiliate him publicly, we've definitely got to end this scourge of drinking kids!
I hate to keep coming back to this, but these people just bring out the worst in me. I don't like hypocrites. And people who aren't even bright enough to realize they're hypocrites send me over the edge. I've just never seen people like Newt Gingrich, Bill Bennett and the neighborhood busybody as heroes. `Do as I say, not as I do.' These dangerous times seem to require everybody get in line and protect these kids from themselves. They'll leave that party and go out and be unruly or drive a car and cause a deadly accident. These are legitimate concerns, and I don't want to pooh-pooh them. But there are some things about all this that really trouble me.
First of all, who sent this e-mail to the principal and why? Since when is a high-school principal the moral watchdog of his student body? And if a student sent the e-mail, are we turning out a nice group of little snitches, hoping this kind of thing will coalesce into an American version of the Hitler youth? If it was a parent, I don't see why even the `chaperone’ of this youthful teen date-night soiree has to be responsible for what kids besides his own are doing, even in his house. And why don't the disgruntled parents who found these goings-on a problem confront him privately? This talk about `pep walks’ sounds to me like the self-appointed morals cops are getting out of hand. Don't let your kids go to parties if you need to protect them from dissipation. I'm willing to bet that forbidding kids from drinking is only encouraging them to drink and taste the forbidden fruit. Everybody is responsible for their own kids, in a world where the right-wingers want everybody to be responsible for themselves, it seems to me. I remember these moralists attacking Hillary Clinton's book, `It Takes a Village,' over exactly this point.
And yes, lets rake some poor schmuck over the coals so he won't commit this outrageous act again. We need a society where everybody follows the rules handed down by people who know right from wrong here, and if dragging him out in public ruins his life, all the better. He'll be punished for his sins. Lets bring back the pillory and scarlet letters. We all must be pure in the brave new moral world, and public disapproval will purify the society and bring us closer to God, I suppose.
`Yes, God, its us good Americans here, and we pilloried three drunken drivers, dragged a homosexual behind a bus, and stoned an adulterer today. We do your will. Sanctify us.
And we also rained 10,000 thousand-pound bombs on Iraqis today, teaching those Satanic Muslims to give up their infidel ways and follow Christ in the pursuit of revenge and Armageddon so that all us good people will join Jesus in the sky as the faces of the sinners melt while a vengeful God incinerates their very bones to enthrone the rule of virtue on Earth.' If this is Christian virtue, I'll take vice, thanks.
I suspect these people so concerned about the virtue of the young have no qualms at all about sending them off to the military, training them to kill and turning them loose in Iraq to kill towel-heads. `Don't drive drunk, you'll kill yourselves or somebody else.' Isn't life in a war zone a little-bit worse than drunk driving? War is good; vice is bad.
I hope that there's a new generation of young people getting as fed up with this holier-than-thou garbage, and that they rebel just as my peers did 40 years ago. But the young people just don't seem to have admirable role models like Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones these days. I'm not sure I know what Jessica Simpson, Ben Affleck and Hillary Duff stand for, but I'm pretty sure its not tolerance and questioning authority. And the rap people seem to be all about money and self-aggrandizement.
More's the pity if authority is represented by the self-righteous moralizers this flap exposes to the light.