From Here to Bangladesh

Beautiful day here on the Platinum Coast of California, with plenty of sunshine on the red tile roofs, the luxury automobiles, the Farmer’s Market, and the tourists strolling along the waterfront. It’s enough to make a man think nothing but happy thoughts, but I found myself thinking about that factory in Bangladesh that collapsed, killing around 300 human beings.

Those people died because of “market forces” and the “globalized” economy; they died because the game is low wages and low prices at Target and Wal-Mart and Macy’s. For the labor contractors, wholesalers and retailers, it’s business as usual, collateral damage, not their fault. Nobody’s to blame -- it’s just the way of the world, everybody trying to pull down some coin.

Get the most labor you can for the lowest amount you can pay. In the global economy handbook, Volume I, page 1, this is described as sound business, not exploitation. Chase cheap labor from Mexico to Thailand to China to Bangladesh to Sri Lanka, and never lose a minute worrying about the welfare of the people down on the sweat shop floor. The world is divided into camps: slaves and masters, workers and owners, damned and blessed, losers and winners, unlucky and lucky. This is the way it has always been, and will always be.

If we paid those folks in Bangladesh a decent wage, allowed them to form unions, and get all uppity with rights and entitlements, American consumers couldn’t buy t-shirts at H&M for $6 a pop, and we couldn’t pay the CEO three hundred times what his secretary earns. And that would be awful, wouldn’t it?

About as awful as that ratfucker George W. Bush opening his library and museum down in Texas. The most anti-intellectual president of the modern era has his own library, a showcase for two disastrous terms in office, two wars, state-sanctioned kidnapping and torture, Guantanamo, Katrina, and an economic meltdown not seen since the Great Depression. The revision of history has begun in earnest. I doubt we’ve seen the last of W. A few years from now he’ll pop up as a GOP elder statesman, with his sordid past forgotten by the faithful.

But like I said, it was a beautiful day, full of light and color, reds and greens and blues. It’s a long, long way from the Platinum Coast to Bangladesh, but the thought I can’t get out of my head is that it’s not as far as we think.   

Strange Week in America

First, the Boston bombing. Then the capitulation of the United States Senate to the National Rifle Association. Then the explosion at that fertilizer factory in Texas.

Death, disruption, shock, fear.

Knocked North Korea out of the headlines. I guess the “tense” situation wasn’t so tense after all.

I don’t yet know what to make of the Boston Marathon bombing. Were the perpetrators terrorists in the classic sense – or publicity hounds? What was their beef and what were they trying to prove? How did they obtain their weapons? Was it really necessary for the forces of law & order to roll out every high-tech, paramilitary piece of gear in their formidable arsenal to apprehend a 19-year-old kid? To lock down a major city? At what point do common sense precautions become paranoid overkill? Will we lose even more of our civil liberties because of what happened in Boston? Will we acquiesce to more surveillance cameras, more electronic intrusion into our daily lives?

Don’t misunderstand – I’m not discounting the victims or playing down the carnage -- the photographs I saw in the on-line edition of the Los Angeles Times were gruesome, horrifying, and every person killed or wounded or maimed loves someone and is loved in return, is connected to someone whose life will not be the same again.

What I’m remembering is the aftermath of 9/11, how the country lost its collective mind, and how our political leaders curtailed our civil liberties and launched two wars in the name of fighting Terror. Yes, the crime in Boston was terrible, but an emotional overreaction might prove to be worse in the long run. Cooler heads should prevail, but I suspect cool heads will be very hard to find.

What happened in the Senate this week only proves the failure of our democracy. The Senate touts itself as the world’s greatest deliberative body, an institution where logic, facts, and reason prevail, but the truth is that in the Senate all that really matters is money.  When it comes to gun control, or, gun safety as it’s euphemistically called, I expect to hear twisted, perverse reasoning from Republicans; I don’t expect to see four senators from the majority caving to their fear of the NRA.

President Obama made the speeches, shed the tears, said all the right things to the right audiences, but when it came to the nitty-gritty, arm-twisting that has to be done to pass legislation in our dysfunctional democracy, he failed once again. Despite his reelection, Obama still hasn’t located his cajones. 

Not that any significant gun legislation ever had a chance of passing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, because the NRA has a lock on that body. Voters want sensible gun laws, sensible restrictions on who can buy and own a gun, but our lawmakers will continue to ignore us, no matter how many children are killed, because they are scared witless by the NRA, and the NRA is in turn beholden to 18^th century thinking.

When I hear the NRA and its acolytes talk about the need for citizens to own guns for the purpose of protecting themselves from depredations by the government, I think of the Boston Police Department and all the paramilitary equipment it deployed this week, the officers who looked exactly like soldiers, the black armored vehicles, and I think of some idiot who believes that owning a .12 gauge shotgun is going to protect him and his family from all that firepower.

Good luck with that, pal. 

Black Bill

So, Obama isn’t a Democrat after all.

The signs have been evident for a long time, starting with Obama’s reluctance to prosecute criminal bankers, to make good on his promise to shut down the colossal embarrassment that is Guantanamo prison, and his willingness to abandon a public health care option before debate even began.

Obama drifted further from his base by expanding drone warfare in Pakistan, cracking down on whistleblowers at home, and waffling on his support for real action on climate change. He talked about “clean” coal when he knew full well that no such thing exists; he expanded oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico -- after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Obama is the black reincarnation of Bill Clinton, a Democrat ever willing to abandon the party’s long standing principles in favor of a slick deal with his political opponents and campaign contributors. Let’s not forget that Obama surrounded himself with Clintonites in his first cabinet, including alumni like Lawrence Summers, Rahm Emanuel and Hilary Clinton herself. Like the consummate snake oil salesman that he is, Obama used soaring rhetoric about hope and change to get people – particularly young voters -- excited enough to elect him, and then, once in office, he methodically abandoned every one of his rhetorical positions in favor of “bipartisanship,” which means, of course, terrible proposals and awful legislation, or, more often than not, no legislation at all.

Obama has now made a budget proposal that offers to reduce Social Security benefits -- long a goal of political conservatives who abhor any government initiative that actually works as it was designed to -- in exchange for GOP concessions on tax hikes on the wealthy. Is this a savvy ploy to gain political advantage, the equivalent of a jujitsu move? Is Obama a master pragmatist? Or does he really believe the only way to save Social Security in the long run is to castrate it in the short run?

I don’t know.

What remains of the political left is angry with Obama, but we are an impotent, disorganized lot easily ignored or discredited by the corporate media. John Boehner and his little henchman, Eric Cantor, are probably giddy at the prospect of finally starting the process of dismantling Social Security as we know it, and even more ecstatic that a Democratic president opened the door. Wall Street bankers and money managers are salivating at the thought of the millions in fees they stand to rake in if Social Security is changed from a public trust to a semi-private one.

I’m not surprised that Obama bends his base over a chair and sodomizes it; he’s a stooge of Wall Street, as are most Democrats and almost all Republicans. Politicians of whatever stripe pay lip service to the will of the “American people,” and then proceed to do exactly what their masters tell them to do.  My own congressional representative, Lois Capps, who I believe is a decent person, nearly always votes with the president. I start every letter or e-mail I send to her like this: “You don’t represent me or my interests, and I know you never will, but you’re the only game in town…”

Our political duopoly is rotten, rotten from within, corrupted by money and influence peddling. The Obama campaign spent billions of dollars in 2012 to convince voters of how different he was from Mitt Romney, and of course Obama is different, but the differences are not as stark as his spin-machine wanted us to believe. Obama lives comfortably on the center-right of the political spectrum, rubbing ideological shoulders with financiers and bankers, playing golf at the country club with neoliberals and oil company oligarchs.

Obama is Black Bill, Clinton’s brother of another color.  

Fat Cats, Skinny Dogs

I heard the economic lie again this morning on ABC News, how Wall Street was not impressed by the latest jobs report. The talking head doing the report made the remark matter-of-factly, as if the only thing that matters when it comes to economic news is whether or not Wall Street approves.

To all but the dullest or most ideologically deranged Americans (politicians from both corporate parties fall into this latter category, though I exempt Senator Bernie Sanders), it’s clear that Wall Street and the interests of citizens have nothing in common. Wall Street is about stocks, bonds, investors, obscene executive salaries, insider trading and outright fraud, while Main Street is about jobs and wages, the price of gasoline, milk, meat, health care and college tuition.

But almost all mainstream media reporting about the economy focuses on Wall Street investors, the wealth created by trading shares or commodities, credit default swaps and the like; this is sold to citizens by the corporate megaphone as the equivalent of the real economy where the majority of us live and work, but we know better -- workers don’t receive zero-strings attached taxpayer bailouts, and in fact only receive federal unemployment benefits grudgingly, after brutal political mud wrestling in which one party is forced into absurd concessions for the sake of the other’s ideological hard-on.

Corporations own the media, and media do the corporate chieftains’ bidding, parroting the boardroom line and narrowing the news focus so that Americans can have no idea of what is going on in their own country, let alone around the world. We know plenty about the Royal couple, Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy, Beyonce’s philosophical proclamations, any number of salacious murder trials, and what shows are on the prime time TV schedule, but far too little about climate change, our burgeoning prison population and racist justice system, the cost of college tuition and health care, food and other necessities.  

To top things off, by his latest budget proposal, President Obama appears very willing to roll the dice on Social Security in the hope that by doing so he can extract GOP agreement to raise taxes on the wealthy who have been enjoying a decades long tax holiday. Obama’s head appears to be buried in Bill Clinton’s behind, for remember it was Slick Willie who triangulated his way to NAFTA, the crime bill, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act; Clinton never hesitated to sell Democrats down the river, and neither does Obama.

It’s absolutely maddening, a daily assault on one’s intelligence. When a hack like Jim Cramer is afforded more airtime and credibility than real economists like Joseph Stiglitz or Richard Wolff, you know you are living in a nation fearful of confronting itself; better slick hype and fantasy than the unsettling truth that the economy is not recovering for average working folks, only for the fat cats in the penthouse suite.