The US is now facing the greatest concentration of wealth at the top that we have seen since 1929, and we seem to have a Forever War going on. Even during the Clinton years, between the two Iraq wars, we continued a program of "low-intensity" warfare against Saddam. We have now shifted our focus to Afghanistan--that eternal sink of imperial ambitions--and will likely take on Pakistan next, followed by Iran.
The New Democrats in the US seem to be imperialist Republicans minus the hoods and burning crosses. The nation is being swept by anti-intellectualism: fundamentalist religion, climate change denial, writing Thomas Jefferson out of the history books, and the like. The public schools are being reduced to serf academies where students learn the minimal literacy and numeracy skills required to make them useful for their masters, while those parts of the curriculum having to do with critical thinking, artistic expression, and general understanding of the world are being subverted by various strategems.
A large portion of this country seems to think they live in a universe equipped with different physical laws than the one I believe myself to inhabit. Somehow, I think this is no accident. People who are willing to believe that humans coexisted with dinosaurs are also likely to accept the notion that their interests will best be served by deregulating the corporations and predatory investment banks, and that their true enemies are the trade unions, the Muslims, the socialists, and the brown-skinned unfortunates who pick their crops under brutal conditions for desperately little pay.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Saturday, May 22, 2010
I think we will look back on the BP disaster as a tipping point.
Its impact on national and world consciousness will rival and perhaps ultimately exceed that of 9-11.
In a corporate calamity like this one, the most important thing from the corporate perspective is to first, minimize the significance of the disaster and second, to shift blame.
The corporate overlords seem to have lost control of the message entirely on this one.
It's hard to minimize the impending destruction of that heavily populated, economically significant, favored fantasy land of everyone's imagination that is the Gulf. And everyone seems to know who to blame. For example, Rush's meme about "eco-terrorism" crashed on takeoff. Contrast this situation with the Exxon Valdez. In that case, they were able to cover up much of the extent of the damage, at least from the view of the general public, largely because it happened in such a remote area. Nobody really much cared about Alaska. They didn't have fantasies about retiring there on a yacht. Also, Exxon was pretty much able to pin the whole rap on a drunken sea captain. No such luck in the Gulf. Everyone knows that it was deliberate corporate malfeasance, aided and abetted by deregulating politicians, that lay at the core of the tragedy.
As for the effects of this disaster on world consciousness, this could be the blow that ends the public's "abuse cycle" with Big Oil. After this beating, we're maybe finally gonna leave that sonuvabitch for good. We really mean it this time.
And it may be a wake-up call on the environment. The problem with "global warming" as a mobilizing cause is that it's slowly incremental (boiling the proverbial frog), erratic, and taking place in a complex, chaotic, and unpredictable system, the global climate. It's a lot easier to get the point of an oil-drenched bird than it is of a half-degree rise in mean temperature (even though the latter is part of a far more lethal process in the long run).
In short, global warming is pretty abstract. Oil on the beaches is concrete. 9-11 was concrete. People mobilize to concrete threats far more readily than to abstract ones.
In a corporate calamity like this one, the most important thing from the corporate perspective is to first, minimize the significance of the disaster and second, to shift blame.
The corporate overlords seem to have lost control of the message entirely on this one.
It's hard to minimize the impending destruction of that heavily populated, economically significant, favored fantasy land of everyone's imagination that is the Gulf. And everyone seems to know who to blame. For example, Rush's meme about "eco-terrorism" crashed on takeoff. Contrast this situation with the Exxon Valdez. In that case, they were able to cover up much of the extent of the damage, at least from the view of the general public, largely because it happened in such a remote area. Nobody really much cared about Alaska. They didn't have fantasies about retiring there on a yacht. Also, Exxon was pretty much able to pin the whole rap on a drunken sea captain. No such luck in the Gulf. Everyone knows that it was deliberate corporate malfeasance, aided and abetted by deregulating politicians, that lay at the core of the tragedy.
As for the effects of this disaster on world consciousness, this could be the blow that ends the public's "abuse cycle" with Big Oil. After this beating, we're maybe finally gonna leave that sonuvabitch for good. We really mean it this time.
And it may be a wake-up call on the environment. The problem with "global warming" as a mobilizing cause is that it's slowly incremental (boiling the proverbial frog), erratic, and taking place in a complex, chaotic, and unpredictable system, the global climate. It's a lot easier to get the point of an oil-drenched bird than it is of a half-degree rise in mean temperature (even though the latter is part of a far more lethal process in the long run).
In short, global warming is pretty abstract. Oil on the beaches is concrete. 9-11 was concrete. People mobilize to concrete threats far more readily than to abstract ones.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
THE LITTLE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF (Updated)
There once was a shepherd boy who had the job of tending to the sheep that belonged to a village. He was watching over the sheep as they grazed in a clearing in a forest when a great pack of wolves appeared out of the forest and began chasing the sheep and scattering them. The boy cried “Wolves, wolves!” and all the villagers ran away because they were frightened.
"Don't cry 'wolf', shepherd boy," said the villagers after they straggled back to their village, "You frighten people with talk like that!"
A few days later, the wolves returned and the boy cried out again, "Wolves! Wolves! The wolves are chasing the sheep!" The villagers again ran away, leaving him alone to protect the sheep as best he could.
“We told you not to frighten us with these stories of wolves,” said the villagers. “We don’t believe you. We don’t think you ever saw any wolves.” From then on, they simply ignored the boy when he sounded the warning about wolves; they did not run away, but neither did they come to help him protect the sheep.
The wolves grew ever bolder, seeing that they had to contend with only one small boy. One day they summoned all the wolf packs from the surrounding countryside to join them in a gigantic raid on the flock. They dragged all the sheep off into the woods to eat at their leisure. They killed the shepherd boy and took his body along with them as well.
After a while the people of the village began to grow hungry for mutton, so they set out to bring home a sheep from the flock. When they got to the clearing in the forest, they found no sheep and no shepherd boy. “Look at this,” they told each other. “That thieving little boy has gone away and taken all our sheep with him. Now we know why he was crying ‘Wolf’ all the time. He was setting up his alibi.”
The moral of the story: Truth is precious. Don’t tell it too often, or nobody will believe you.
"Don't cry 'wolf', shepherd boy," said the villagers after they straggled back to their village, "You frighten people with talk like that!"
A few days later, the wolves returned and the boy cried out again, "Wolves! Wolves! The wolves are chasing the sheep!" The villagers again ran away, leaving him alone to protect the sheep as best he could.
“We told you not to frighten us with these stories of wolves,” said the villagers. “We don’t believe you. We don’t think you ever saw any wolves.” From then on, they simply ignored the boy when he sounded the warning about wolves; they did not run away, but neither did they come to help him protect the sheep.
The wolves grew ever bolder, seeing that they had to contend with only one small boy. One day they summoned all the wolf packs from the surrounding countryside to join them in a gigantic raid on the flock. They dragged all the sheep off into the woods to eat at their leisure. They killed the shepherd boy and took his body along with them as well.
After a while the people of the village began to grow hungry for mutton, so they set out to bring home a sheep from the flock. When they got to the clearing in the forest, they found no sheep and no shepherd boy. “Look at this,” they told each other. “That thieving little boy has gone away and taken all our sheep with him. Now we know why he was crying ‘Wolf’ all the time. He was setting up his alibi.”
The moral of the story: Truth is precious. Don’t tell it too often, or nobody will believe you.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
How to Reform Government in a Single Great Leap Forward
The Supreme Court appears poised to permit a massive relaxation of the rules on political contributions. I applaud this trend, but fear that it doesn’t go nearly far enough in cleaning up the tangle of rules and regulations governing our electoral process. Therefore, I would like to propose some simple reforms to make government more responsive and efficient. My grand scheme is predicated on the well-documented fact that political outcomes are decided by money, and upon the apparent intention of the Supreme Court to accelerate this trend. The genius of plan I am about to propose is that it turns what is often perceived as a flaw or failure of the system into a virtue.
The first step in my plan is to permit unlimited contributions to politicians. Any politician will be allowed to take any amount of money from any source at any time.
Second, the cumbersome electoral apparatus will be junked. Instead, all political offices will be put up for bid. Anyone who wants to be a Senator, for example, will submit a bid of so many dollars for the job, and the job will be awarded to the highest bidder. Once in office, the politician will receive no salary; instead, each will be expected to support him/herself on a fee-for-service basis, by selling individual votes on proposed legislation, charging a substantial fee to introduce proposed legislation written by corporate lawyers, etc.
This plan is startling in its elegant simplicity and cost-effectiveness. It can be made to work at all levels of government, from the local city council to the Presidency. In a single stroke it converts the government from a financial drag on society into a center of profit. Furthermore, in the same stroke, it restores honesty to the system. No longer will politicians have to maintain a pretense of serving the interests of people without money. No longer will we be plagued with financial scandals. And no longer will the public need to be distracted from Nintendo, celebrity news, and reality television by so-called “electoral politics.”
This general philosophical approach can be extended beyond the Executive and Legislative branches to the Judicial branch as well. The whole expensive edifice of the Court system, at all its levels, can simply be replaced by a simple system in which court decisions will be determined by a fair and honest bidding process. This can be made to work handily in both civil and criminal matters. If a poor person steals from a rich person, the rich person can pay to have the criminal convicted and punished. As a side benefit, I predict that our jail and prison systems would fall into disuse, at a great cost savings to society, as offended rich people opt to use cheaper means, such as fines, floggings and hangings, to punish those who have offended against them. As a second side benefit, I predict that the whole apparatus of appellate courts could be eliminated--if a person can’t afford to buy a verdict in a lower court, they will also no doubt be too poor to buy an appellate decision.
The more I think about this system, the fewer flaws I can find in it.
The first step in my plan is to permit unlimited contributions to politicians. Any politician will be allowed to take any amount of money from any source at any time.
Second, the cumbersome electoral apparatus will be junked. Instead, all political offices will be put up for bid. Anyone who wants to be a Senator, for example, will submit a bid of so many dollars for the job, and the job will be awarded to the highest bidder. Once in office, the politician will receive no salary; instead, each will be expected to support him/herself on a fee-for-service basis, by selling individual votes on proposed legislation, charging a substantial fee to introduce proposed legislation written by corporate lawyers, etc.
This plan is startling in its elegant simplicity and cost-effectiveness. It can be made to work at all levels of government, from the local city council to the Presidency. In a single stroke it converts the government from a financial drag on society into a center of profit. Furthermore, in the same stroke, it restores honesty to the system. No longer will politicians have to maintain a pretense of serving the interests of people without money. No longer will we be plagued with financial scandals. And no longer will the public need to be distracted from Nintendo, celebrity news, and reality television by so-called “electoral politics.”
This general philosophical approach can be extended beyond the Executive and Legislative branches to the Judicial branch as well. The whole expensive edifice of the Court system, at all its levels, can simply be replaced by a simple system in which court decisions will be determined by a fair and honest bidding process. This can be made to work handily in both civil and criminal matters. If a poor person steals from a rich person, the rich person can pay to have the criminal convicted and punished. As a side benefit, I predict that our jail and prison systems would fall into disuse, at a great cost savings to society, as offended rich people opt to use cheaper means, such as fines, floggings and hangings, to punish those who have offended against them. As a second side benefit, I predict that the whole apparatus of appellate courts could be eliminated--if a person can’t afford to buy a verdict in a lower court, they will also no doubt be too poor to buy an appellate decision.
The more I think about this system, the fewer flaws I can find in it.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
McCain/Palin.
Those four syllables are the only things that arise in my mind to counter my growing suspicion that I should maybe have ridden the Kucinich train all the way into the wall in 2008. I knew Dennis couldn’t win; in fact, his intransigence may have made him a poor and ineffective President. But casting a vote for him would at least have informed the world that I didn’t think anyone else in the candidate field was sufficiently progressive for me.
So instead I gritted my teeth and worked for Barack Obama, my second-to-last choice for the nomination. I grew to like him more and more, to foolishly start projecting my hopes upon him. He promised things. Not everything I might have wanted, but enough. I believed him. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” I told myself. In a very large room full of other Democrats, I watched him win. We were ecstatic. I was on a natural high for a week.
I had hoped for an FDR-style commitment to the people and the infrastructure of the nation. Here is our great chance to turn an impending disaster into a grand opportunity to put the nation to work building ourselves a modern infrastructure for the new millenium. High-speed rail, a new power grid charged with green energy, a fiber-optic network, universal internet, universal health care to lift that terrible burden from the poeple and revitalize our small businesses…
Now it’s 13 months later. The American Empire is doing well under the new management.
Maybe we have a few less troops and mercenaries in Iraq, but we’re building up and digging in for the long haul in Afghanistan. We have twice as many mercenaries of various stripes in our national defense system as we do government troops.
The criminals of the last administration are at large, doing their part for the new gang by raging and raving against them, helping to maintain the illusion that we now have something fundamentally different.
The banks are bailed out and doing nicely. They have successfully bought off any feeble attempts to re-regulate them. They are busily engaging in the same shady gambling schemes that brought the crisis down on our heads in the first place. Small local banks are folding, and people are losing their homes to foreclosure.
Foreign sweatshops continue to pour their plastic trash into our big-box stores, where we line up to buy that trash and drag it home. Our labor unions continue to fail.
Our privacy rights have evaporated virtually unnoticed.
We have become ever more deeply embedded in our role as serfs in the service of corporate America, and, ever increasingly, the corporations have life-and-death power over us. Whether you live or die will be decided, to a degree even greater than before the Health Care Deform debacle, by how much money you have to feed into the maw of the machine. The IRS will be there to exact the punishments for those who resist.
And who are the villains, the obstructionists, the social saboteurs in the view of la Regime Nouveau? None other than lunatic-fringe moonbats like Howard Dean, Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders. And St. Dennis, of course.
So instead I gritted my teeth and worked for Barack Obama, my second-to-last choice for the nomination. I grew to like him more and more, to foolishly start projecting my hopes upon him. He promised things. Not everything I might have wanted, but enough. I believed him. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” I told myself. In a very large room full of other Democrats, I watched him win. We were ecstatic. I was on a natural high for a week.
I had hoped for an FDR-style commitment to the people and the infrastructure of the nation. Here is our great chance to turn an impending disaster into a grand opportunity to put the nation to work building ourselves a modern infrastructure for the new millenium. High-speed rail, a new power grid charged with green energy, a fiber-optic network, universal internet, universal health care to lift that terrible burden from the poeple and revitalize our small businesses…
Now it’s 13 months later. The American Empire is doing well under the new management.
Maybe we have a few less troops and mercenaries in Iraq, but we’re building up and digging in for the long haul in Afghanistan. We have twice as many mercenaries of various stripes in our national defense system as we do government troops.
The criminals of the last administration are at large, doing their part for the new gang by raging and raving against them, helping to maintain the illusion that we now have something fundamentally different.
The banks are bailed out and doing nicely. They have successfully bought off any feeble attempts to re-regulate them. They are busily engaging in the same shady gambling schemes that brought the crisis down on our heads in the first place. Small local banks are folding, and people are losing their homes to foreclosure.
Foreign sweatshops continue to pour their plastic trash into our big-box stores, where we line up to buy that trash and drag it home. Our labor unions continue to fail.
Our privacy rights have evaporated virtually unnoticed.
We have become ever more deeply embedded in our role as serfs in the service of corporate America, and, ever increasingly, the corporations have life-and-death power over us. Whether you live or die will be decided, to a degree even greater than before the Health Care Deform debacle, by how much money you have to feed into the maw of the machine. The IRS will be there to exact the punishments for those who resist.
And who are the villains, the obstructionists, the social saboteurs in the view of la Regime Nouveau? None other than lunatic-fringe moonbats like Howard Dean, Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders. And St. Dennis, of course.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Is $200,000 a year an "excessive" income?
This question was asked by somebody on an online political forum; what follows was my reply to the inquirer:
Nobody is saying $200k is "excessive"-- depending on what you do to earn it. There are things I wouldn't do for $200k a year.
I think what you're getting at is whether people who make a lot of money should pay more taxes. That is a complicated issue. First, recognize that people who make, say, $200k a year pay the same rate as everyone else on the first $50, 100, 150k of taxable income. If a new higher tax bracket is placed at $200k, only that portion of his total income above $200k is taxed at the higher rate.
And recognize that people are generally only talking about income and estate taxes when they get themselves all worked up about the unfair taxation of the rich. In today's system, someone who makes $100k pays the same amount into Social Security as does that $200k guy. They both pay the same sales tax on a tube of tooth paste. They both pay the same amount of property tax per dollar of assessed valuation. And, to the extent that the rich guy's income derives from capital gains that he didn't work for, he will pay a lower rate than that $50k guy who had to actually go out and sweat for his bread. Warren Buffett summarized the situation nicely when he famously pointed out that his secretary pays a higher percentage of her income in taxes than he does.
Third, take note of the fact that the rich guy is likely to make more use of government services than the poor guy. Not only do the courts devote 90% of their resources to settling disputes among businesses, but the fire departments and police forces are primarily concerned with protecting the property of the rich. Even the streets in the rich part of town are likely to have fewer potholes than in the working-class neighborhoods so those Bentleys and Ferraris ride smoother and retain their resale value a bit better.
And lastly, recall that our gigantic military, on which we spend nearly as much as the rest of the world combined does on their collective armed forces, serves mostly to guarantee the free flow of oil from parts of the world that we have seriously annoyed with our political and military meddling. Money that could be much more wisely spent on building a green infrastructure at home instead goes to maintain and protect the flow of oil dollars into the coffers of America’s most profitable corporations--corporations that even now, in the midst of a worldwide recession, continue to chalk up record profits thanks to the generosity of American taxpayers.
All in all, it's hard to see how the rich are going to be hurt much, or even manage to argue they are being treated unfairly in any sense, if they are asked to come forward with a few more cents on the dollar so that some less-fortunate people can have adequate health care.
Nobody is saying $200k is "excessive"-- depending on what you do to earn it. There are things I wouldn't do for $200k a year.
I think what you're getting at is whether people who make a lot of money should pay more taxes. That is a complicated issue. First, recognize that people who make, say, $200k a year pay the same rate as everyone else on the first $50, 100, 150k of taxable income. If a new higher tax bracket is placed at $200k, only that portion of his total income above $200k is taxed at the higher rate.
And recognize that people are generally only talking about income and estate taxes when they get themselves all worked up about the unfair taxation of the rich. In today's system, someone who makes $100k pays the same amount into Social Security as does that $200k guy. They both pay the same sales tax on a tube of tooth paste. They both pay the same amount of property tax per dollar of assessed valuation. And, to the extent that the rich guy's income derives from capital gains that he didn't work for, he will pay a lower rate than that $50k guy who had to actually go out and sweat for his bread. Warren Buffett summarized the situation nicely when he famously pointed out that his secretary pays a higher percentage of her income in taxes than he does.
Third, take note of the fact that the rich guy is likely to make more use of government services than the poor guy. Not only do the courts devote 90% of their resources to settling disputes among businesses, but the fire departments and police forces are primarily concerned with protecting the property of the rich. Even the streets in the rich part of town are likely to have fewer potholes than in the working-class neighborhoods so those Bentleys and Ferraris ride smoother and retain their resale value a bit better.
And lastly, recall that our gigantic military, on which we spend nearly as much as the rest of the world combined does on their collective armed forces, serves mostly to guarantee the free flow of oil from parts of the world that we have seriously annoyed with our political and military meddling. Money that could be much more wisely spent on building a green infrastructure at home instead goes to maintain and protect the flow of oil dollars into the coffers of America’s most profitable corporations--corporations that even now, in the midst of a worldwide recession, continue to chalk up record profits thanks to the generosity of American taxpayers.
All in all, it's hard to see how the rich are going to be hurt much, or even manage to argue they are being treated unfairly in any sense, if they are asked to come forward with a few more cents on the dollar so that some less-fortunate people can have adequate health care.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Veterans days always make me feel weird.
Veterans days always make me feel weird.
Especially when someone says "Thank you for your service." You see, I was an infantryman in Vietnam, but I did not serve willingly. I was drafted, forced into a deadly form of involuntary servitude, and whatever illusions I might originally have had about the rightness of the war were quickly torn from me when I saw what we were doing to the innocent people, the sacred soils, the beautiful waters and jungles and mountains of that tormented land.
"No, don't thank me," I want to say. "Forgive me. Forgive me for participating in that awful event in your name. If you must thank me for something, then thank me for joining the movement to stop the war when I got home. Maybe thank me for the things I have tried to do for the castoffs of society--the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, the emotionally damaged products of chaotic and abusive homes who have gone on to fill our jails and prisons. But don't thank me for going off to participate in the destruction of a foreign land whose residents never intended any harm to you or me."
Especially when someone says "Thank you for your service." You see, I was an infantryman in Vietnam, but I did not serve willingly. I was drafted, forced into a deadly form of involuntary servitude, and whatever illusions I might originally have had about the rightness of the war were quickly torn from me when I saw what we were doing to the innocent people, the sacred soils, the beautiful waters and jungles and mountains of that tormented land.
"No, don't thank me," I want to say. "Forgive me. Forgive me for participating in that awful event in your name. If you must thank me for something, then thank me for joining the movement to stop the war when I got home. Maybe thank me for the things I have tried to do for the castoffs of society--the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, the emotionally damaged products of chaotic and abusive homes who have gone on to fill our jails and prisons. But don't thank me for going off to participate in the destruction of a foreign land whose residents never intended any harm to you or me."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
