The Fall of our Discontent

“The United States has entered a new historical era marked by a growing disinvestment in the social state, public goods, and civic morality.”  Henry Giroux

I can’t bear to watch the Republican National Convention, and when I heard Ralph Reed spinning a fable about thousands of nuclear centrifuges in Iran on Democracy Now on the radio this morning, I immediately switched the channel.

I’ve heard enough lies. The Republican Party is a monstrosity, full of zealots with zero respect for facts, science, history or rational inquiry. Their kit bag is loaded with tired and failed prescriptions, from tax cuts as a job generator to blind support of Israel, from deranged hostility to the public sector to opposition to abortion under any circumstances. Their belief in fairy tales is absolute and no amount of reason, data, or experience can sway them. If it would further their political power, they would happily run our ship of state aground.

The obstructionist GOP will nominate the human cipher, Mitt Romney, and his running mate, Paul Ryan. Romney seems to believe that his enormous personal wealth entitles him to the presidency, that his experience in the private sector makes him an expert in macroeconomics, and that the sprawling federal government can be run like IBM or Exxon-Mobil. Ryan is touted as a federal budget prodigy, but as Paul Krugman and others have pointed out, Ryan’s math is fuzzy. Given his way, Ryan would shred what little remains of the American social safety net and hand even larger tax breaks to people who least need them. Under Ryan’s prescriptions, the rich would become richer, the poor more so, and the gap between the two even wider than it is today.

Romney is the wind-up candidate, a politician who offers whatever audience he appears before whatever he thinks they want in the moment. Tonight he’s for marriage equality, tomorrow morning he’s against it. Looking in at Romney one sees no hint of soul or character, and he can hardly be regarded as a mirror of who the majority of us are.

I imagine the word “socialist” will be heard frequently this week in heavily guarded, Homeland Security-occupied Tampa. That the Right has affixed this label to Obama is a signature propaganda achievement since by no objective measure can any of Obama’s policy initiatives be called socialist. 

The Right will never admit the truth, but in Obama the status quo has had a devoted servant.

As Thomas Frank writes in the September issue of Harper’s:

“What Barack Obama has saved is a bankrupt elite that by all rights should have met its end in 2009. He came to the White House amid circumstances similar to 1933, but proceeded to rule like Herbert Hoover.”

I admit to drinking several pints of Obama’s Kool-Aid in 2008. Exhausted after eight years of the Bush-Cheney junta, I fell for the rhetoric of hope and change and fully suspended my critical faculties. Only after Obama surrounded himself with a posse of Clinton-era operatives did I realize how completely I had been duped. In my mind, the trip has been all down hill from there. Obama frittered away the first half of his term when he had majorities in Congress, allowed the right to take control of the national narrative, and failed to use his bully pulpit to advance policies that might have benefitted the middle class and working poor. The country needed a fighter with a tough chin; what we got was a compulsive compromiser.

I won’t watch the Democratic National Convention either, since the contemporary Democratic Party doesn’t represent my interests. As a matter of conscience I might not vote at all come November.

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that it really makes no difference. 

August Farrago

Readers of the Balcony are a small, exclusive, and devoted lot who deserve far better than the meager output I’ve managed of late. Not much to offer in my own defense, other than to say these are the canine days of August which bring heat and induce lassitude.

There is no shortage of subjects to write about, only insufficient motivation to do so.

Here on the Platinum Coast a trio of events marks summer: the Solstice parade, the 4^th of July fireworks celebration, and Fiesta week. All are behind us now, though tourists still meander along State Street or wander Cabrillo Boulevard in search of landmarks to film or photograph. For kids, mine included, the clock is winding down and the new school term is no longer a distant event. Fans of the English Premier League (go Chelsea!) are anxiously awaiting the start of a new campaign, only a few days off now; American professional football teams are playing pre-season games, and the marathon Major League Baseball campaign has entered the stretch run toward the playoffs, and Derek Jeter and the Yankees are still in the hunt, despite being beset by injuries to key players all year.

The marine layer that is so prevalent in June and July hasn’t dared show its dreary face for days; mornings dawn clear, and in the late afternoon, cumulonimbus cloud formations rise over the blue-green Santa Ynez mountains. Seeing the clouds billow over peaks I have looked at most of my life, I can’t help but think of wildfires; we’ve had our share the past few years. When the foothills and backcountry are tinder dry a single errant spark and some wind are enough to produce a conflagration. Never will I forget being five or six, looking toward the mountains after sunset from our house on Ardilla Drive, and seeing flames from what came to be called the Coyote Fire advancing along the ridgeline as if no power on earth could stop them. The image has stayed with me all these years.

As the heat of the day gives way to another lovely evening, I can tell you, loyal readers, that I’m a lucky SOB. My family is healthy and thriving, my spouse continues to love me after nearly twenty years of marriage, the roof over our heads, though modest and rented, is watertight and the refrigerator is well stocked with staples.

Only a fool would complain.

The Cult of More

“In the midnight hour she cried ‘more, more, more.’” Rebel Yell, Billy Idol

John Boehner, our lachrymose Speaker of the House, insists at every opportunity that small businesses will suffer and stop hiring new workers unless the Obama administration once again extends the Bush-era tax cuts, but like all Republicans who inhabit economic fantasy land, Boehner never cites any objective evidence to support his point, like the fact that a miniscule percentage of small business owners would feel any pain if the Bush era cuts are allowed to expire – as they should.

Not that Boehner need bother with facts – the commercial media is all too happy to repeat his tripe without challenge.

Tax cuts as be-all, end-all, one-size-fits-all economic policy are an article of faith in the ranks of the GOP and on right-wing talk radio. In Congress, Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell bemoan the plight of small business owners as if their existence is constantly endangered. Switch on talk radio – if your mind can bear it – and Limbaugh, Hannity and O’Reilly echo the message day after day.

Taxes are too high and that’s why our economy isn’t rebounding! Taxes are too high and it’s all Obama’s fault! That unholy socialist Obama is scheming to steal the hard-earned income of this nation’s producers!

Someone able to speak Boehner’s peculiar language should explain to him that George W. Bush’s gift to America’s wealthiest citizens has been in play for more than a decade now, and that tax rates are at historically low levels. The wealthy and the uber-wealthy haven’t had it this good in decades, and the chasm that lies between these fortunates and the rest of us prove the point beyond any reasonable doubt.

By Boehner’s “low taxes equal booming economy” logic, the nation should be swimming in employment opportunities and all those heroic, stalwart small business owners across our blessed nation should be happier than pigs in slop.

Those of us who reside in the real world of flat wages and insecure employment know the score: the tax code and the entire economic system is a creation of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy.

Working people don’t need to be told the deck is stacked against us anymore than we need to be reminded that neither political party represents our hopes and concerns.

We know any claim Republicans or Democrats make about job creation is hollow unless it also reveals whether the jobs are permanent or contingent, with employer-sponsored benefits or without, at a poverty wage or a liveable wage.

We haven’t forgotten the millions of jobs vaporized when the misdeeds of our financial masters came home to roost in 2008, and we know the majority of those jobs will never return, nor will the lives of thousands of our fellow wage earners ever be the same again. For working people it was the shaft -- for Wall Street it was low interest loans and taxpayer guarantees to make the banks and hedge funds and financial speculators whole. And look how it played out: the financial sector recovered quickly from the crisis, resumed business as if the calamity never happened, and no banker or CEO need worry about being held accountable for the blood on their hands. 

As Bruce Springsteen sings in a song from his album Wrecking Ball, “up on Banker’s Hill the party’s going strong.”

What do working people get as the recession drags on and on? Fiscal austerity, hysterical attacks on Social Security and Medicare and unemployment insurance, rabid assaults on public employees, their pension plans and their unions, public education, teachers. Even the venerable Postal Service, reliable servant of the underclass, must be targeted for dismantling and sale to the highest bidder.

Millions of us reject the prevailing ethos of this hyper-competitive, dog-devour-dog, more-more-more age, not because we are brilliant or noble but for the simple reason that this insane system isn’t sustainable. Perhaps in their headlong dash to incentivize destruction the oligarchs have forgotten or willfully ignored the lessons of history, but not us. Wisdom, courage, justice and moderation are the values that make for a sane, civilized society; one built on folly, mendacity, injustice and excess must eventually collapse.  

More, more, more.

This is the rallying cry as the morning sun rises over the canyons of Wall Street. More luxury vehicles, more homes, more yachts, more Gulfstream jets, more penthouses; more money, more connections, more power. Enough is never enough. Grab one brass ring and another immediately takes its place. No matter how much one has, someone else has more.

The beast of capitalism must be put back on its chain and trained to obey if for no other reason than to save itself – and us -- from certain death.