Descent into Madness, Part I

“Casino capitalism is the true religion of America and provides common ground for both major parties, in spite of their differences on the role of government and the welfare state.”          Henry Giroux

I started this blog almost ten years ago, when George W. Bush was President.  Dick Cheney was running the show and the United States was waist deep in its illegal occupation of Iraq, and three years into the occupation of Afghanistan. The War on Terror was in full swing. The creepily named Patriotic Act had been enacted with near unanimous consent of Congress. Bush’s tax gift to the millionaire class was working as intended, delivering big benefits to people who didn’t need them; just about any American with a pulse and the capacity to sign his or her name could qualify for a home mortgage.

Bush, a serial fuck-up, derided intellectual activity and passed himself off as a simple good ol’ boy from Texas who believed in a Christian God, America, Baseball, and Capitalism. His partner, Uncle Dick Cheney, swaggered like a neo-Fascist and muttered darkly about terrorist threats and the imperative to kill Muslims. Cheney believed that the only way to protect Americans from evildoers was to extend unlimited power to the Executive Branch.

It was a bad and embarrassing time to be an American, and I was always pissed off, fuming, and shocked about what my country was becoming. I wrote to save my sanity more than anything else. Fear hung over the nation and for a sense of security we willingly traded our liberties and our privacy. At the time I had no idea how bad things would get in the years ahead.

Sometimes when I consider the fundamental changes that have taken place in the United States in my lifetime my head spins as if I am afflicted with vertigo. I grew up believing that the country worked because it shared its unparalleled wealth with as many of its citizens as possible. The idea of sharing prosperity was valued. My father was a working class guy, a butcher by trade, and a member of a labor union; he earned a decent wage and we had a toehold in the middle-class. America seemed generous back then rather than stingy; kind rather than cruel; open rather closed, confident rather than fearful. Our government was a force for good, it could right wrongs and protect people from some of life’s vicissitudes. Our despicable racist history could be slightly ameliorated by passage of the Voting Rights Act, for example, and the plight of the poor was taken seriously enough to prompt President Johnson to launch a War against Poverty.

How times change. In 2013, under a Democratic president, we criminalize and punish the poor.

True, the government lied about our situation in Vietnam, insisting that victory was right around the corner when in fact we were on the long highway to defeat. College campuses across the nation were hotbeds of unrest. Young people wore their hair long, and many of them, particularly in crazy California, smoked marijuana, dropped LSD and set their draft cards on fire. Hippies made my grandmother nervous. Charlie Manson and his followers put the fear of Satan in Los Angeles residents. Black rage erupted in Detroit, Watts, Newark and Harlem because white America had too long ignored the cries of black America. Whites fled inner cities for the safety of the suburbs. The decade of the 60’s was terrifying and bloody. We buried two Kennedy’s, Martin and Malcolm, and our collective dreams. 

Richard Nixon was in the White House when the 70’s came along, and he made law and order the rage along with stoking the racial fears of southern voters.  Kent State happened on Nixon’s watch, unarmed students gunned down by National Guard troops, like a scene lifted from Argentina or Chile. Nixon eventually resigned in disgrace to be replaced by Gerald Ford. Saigon fell, the economy was ravaged by inflation, and the nation seemed to lose its mojo and its swagger. Our confidence wasn’t restored by Jimmy Carter’s single term, though Carter was a decent and, for the most part, honorable man. The overthrow of our man in Iran, the Shah, and the hostage crisis that followed made it clear that our power was limited. At the same time the Japanese appeared poised to dislodge us from our place at the head of the economic table. We began to hear about the Rust Belt.

Then Ronnie Reagan reappeared on the national political stage, with promises to restore America to her rightful place on top of the world. With a prepared script and his actor’s background, Ronnie was a formidable political force, playing the role of president as John Wayne might -- standing tall and talking tough, believing always in the essential goodness of the American people. According to Reagan, government was the problem, and if government would just step out of the way, the energy and productivity and moxie of the American people would flow like the Nile, all the way to prosperity for all.

A big fan of the economist Milton Friedman, Ronnie extolled, in his avuncular and winning way, the virtues of the free market. Forget John Maynard Keynes. Reduce the role of government in the economy, unfetter capital from costly and redundant regulation, and let the just, wise and infallible Market God deliver the bounty. The Reagan era changed the norms of the game, the language of debate, and ignited a war on organized labor, government oversight of business, anti-trust laws, and welfare queens. The market knew best how to reward the producers, the risk takers, and the entrepreneurs, those heroes of commerce who were the only people that mattered.

I was a callow young man back then, and a lot of what Reagan said made sense to me. Fortunately, with the help of experience and learning, I would outgrow Reagan’s oversimplifications.     

Tinder in Search of a Spark

“The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairness’s that afflict the peoples – that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.”  Mark Twain

I desperately want to believe that Chris Hedges (journalist, author, rebel and anarchist) is right when he argues that the corporate elite who own and operate America are running scared, but I have trouble imagining a popular revolt in our future. If Hedges is right, a single incident could spark an uprising and put citizens in the street. I would hope such an uprising, if it happens, would be peaceful, but the powers that be are unlikely to sit idly by when they have militarized police forces at their disposal.

The Occupy movement, although short-lived and largely unfocused as to its political goals, made the corporate elites nervous because the movement made the problem crystal clear: the 99% were being shafted by the 1%, with ample help from courts of law and legislative bodies. Occupy embodied what millions felt and knew to be true because their personal experienced confirmed it.

The 1% drove the final stake into the heart of the American Dream, and as the dream lay dying in the gutter the moguls laughed; they laughed at how easy it was to engineer a corporate coup, to buy politicians wholesale, to crush labor unions, to send millions of jobs abroad, to eliminate or hose down regulations, and to seize de facto control of the legal system. The 1% laughed because even when they lost they won. They knew the asset bubbles they created had to burst, and when the day of reckoning arrived they strolled away from the smoking wreckage richer than ever. The 1% shrugged and said that free market capitalism sometimes worked this way, but the 99% recognized racketeering when we saw it. The federal government once enforced anti-trust laws and prosecuted mobsters, but that was before the death of the American Dream, when working people who played by the rules and tried to do the right thing had a shot at a ticket to the middle class. Today the government sleeps under a goose down comforter with the mobsters.

The Occupy movement gave us images and words to express what we felt but the forces of the state, working on behalf of moneyed interests, moved against Occupy in full riot gear. Sanitation reasons, they claimed. Necessary for protection of private property, they said.  Corporate media echoed these justifications. The usual pundits told us Occupy was way off base, out of touch with Main Street, a nuisance that deserved to be driven from private and public spaces.

What will the spark that ignites the tinder be? Another bailout of Wall Street gamblers? Another stupid war in the Middle East? Financial meltdown, Part II?  Or some other event that will open the people’s eyes to the reality that their government doesn’t work for them, or that American-style capitalism is a game for insiders. 

The insiders build walls and erect fences and invest in barbed wire.

As noted many times before on the Balcony, the American government no longer fears the people, as some European governments fear their citizens. The only sure-fire way to ignite the outrage of average Americans is to take away their access to TV; do that and the people will pour into the streets, armed to the teeth and determined to spill blood. 

Camelot Remembered

The “holiday season” is well under way here on the Platinum Coast, with endless TV commercials for Best Buy and Macy’s and Target; the parking lot at our local Trader Joe’s already wears holiday garb. Buy, buy, buy is the implied message. What will this year’s hottest gift be? Black Friday looms on the horizon, our undeclared national holiday of consumerism and mass psychosis. Come one, come all, bring your nearly maxed out credit cards – unprecedented deals are waiting. Back at corporate headquarters, bean counters pore over sales data and plug numbers into Excel spreadsheets and report the trends to the executive suite.

There will be no holiday season in parts of the Philippines this year, and residents in or near Fukushima will suffer another winter of discontent and abject fear.

According to news reports this has been a bad week for President Obama. The rollout of the Affordable Care Act hasn’t gone well, and the President is being hammered because holders of cheap policies that don’t meet the minimum coverage requirements mandated by the ACA have seen those policies cancelled, even though Obama promised way back when that people who liked their crappy policies could keep them. Obama presses his lips together, as all politicians do when caught in a messy lie, and apologizes for causing a cluster-fuck. What he should apologize for is not pushing for a single-payer system.

I renew my call for a federal law to prohibit Christmas advertising prior to December 1. Let poor Thanksgiving bask in her own glory.

Popular TV shows: Scandal, Revenge, Betrayal. Do these titles speak to an American Zeitgeist? We live scandal every day, the political class has betrayed us, and worst of all, the game is rigged so that revenge is impossible. The big crooks have big lawyers and big friends in very high places. We’ve arranged things so that the wealthy are virtually untouchable; they break the law with impunity.

Fifty years ago this next week JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. I was four years old at the time, and therefore too young to remember what I was doing or where I was when the news came that Kennedy had been killed. Years later I would learn about what happened in Dallas through black and white photographs in a book I found in the hall closet. Camelot. Legend and myth, and endless speculation about what might have been if JFK hadn’t been killed. Before the decade was over, JFK’s brother Robert would be gunned down in Los Angeles, and Martin Luther King Jr., would fall to an assassin’s bullet in Memphis. The 60’s were a murderous decade, and many dreams were shattered. Our national innocence died in the 60’s. JFK couldn’t keep the US out of Vietnam.

Fifty years on, the US still maintains a pointless embargo against Cuba.

JFK’s candidacy and presidency ushered in the age of the image, the photograph and the video footage; use the image to shape public perception, and always include the children in the shot.

For all his personal flaws, JFK seemed to offer the best America had to offer – youth, energy, vision and grit. Strip the veils and the Camelot myth away and JFK might not seem such a towering figure, but measured against the trolls who run the nation in 2013, he was a giant.

Border Crossing

“American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world… Thomas Frank, author, What’s the Matter with Kansas

I was getting ready for bed when the phone rang. “Hello,” I said.

“I’m sick and tired of lazy people expecting the government to guarantee them a comfortable life.”

Ever since he began collecting Social Security, Donny has been bitching about welfare, immigrants, and food stamps. We’re friends on Facebook and I see his posts, mainly flaming screeds from Fox News that he passes along. You know, baseless statements like, “America’s economic problems are the result of overly generous social welfare programs.” Yeah, six weeks of unpaid family medical leave is bleeding us dry.

Other than his weird politics, I consider Donny one of my closest friends. He’s got a heart of gold and a soft spot for animals, but when he’s downed seven or eight beers or a flagon of red wine, he slips off the rails and spouts total right-wing gibberish; he leaves his brain and making sense far behind. When I can get a word in, which is rare, I remind him that he’d be sleeping on flattened cardboard under a bridge if not for his pension from the State Teachers Retirement System and his Social Security check.

He says, “I was raised Catholic and I want to help people, but there’s no free lunch. If you want something you’d better be ready to work for it, just like I did. That’s all I’m saying.”

He’s drunk, I’m sober, and there’s no point in arguing. I know from experience that it’s only a matter of time before he starts complaining about Mexicans. In Donny’s view, Mexicans fornicate recklessly and take advantage of America’s big heart and generous nature by suckling at the public teat.

Right on cue Donny says, “Mexican girls need to close their legs. That’s the root problem. Don’t have five kids if you can’t afford to feed them -- that’s all I’m saying. Basic common sense is always in short supply. If you’re living in a converted garage with a hot plate for a stove and a bucket for a toilet, and you’ve already got three kids under the age of five, you keep your legs closed, am I right?”

Sure, Donny, I say. I can hear him slurping another beer, lighting another cigarette. He’s getting loose, building a head of steam; in the morning he won’t remember a damn thing about this call. He says Mexicans are crossing the border in droves, laden with drugs and guns and mean intentions. Never mind that under President Obama the US has deported record numbers of human beings. Donny hasn’t kept up with the doings of ICE.

About the NSA, drone strikes in Pakistan, criminal bankers, income inequality, unabashed support for Israel, and climate change, Donny has nothing to say. Compared to Mexican freeloaders those problems pale. Stop the Mexicans and glory days will be here again.

Donny reminds me of something I heard on the radio the other day about gun violence and terrorism. The probability of an American citizen being killed or injured on US soil in a terrorist attack is infinitesimal, yet to protect ourselves from this threat we have a massive national security apparatus, militarized police forces, and invasive security screening at airports. Small threat, outsized response.

American citizens are far more likely to be killed or injured by a deranged person armed with an assault rifle, but we can’t protect ourselves against this threat because of the NRA and its deliberate misinterpretation of the second amendment. We can’t get background checks or stop the sale of assault weapons or high capacity magazines. This danger is real and constant, and our response is anemic.

My drunken friend worries about the wrong threat, and he’s hardly alone.