A Gilded Spring

I’m wondering today how Venezuela, with a population of about 28 million people, can be considered a “threat” to the United States, as was recently announced by the State Department. This strikes me as utterly bizarre, and I can only assume that Washington is rankled because Venezuela refuses to dance to the neoliberal tune called out by Uncle Sam. Nothing annoys the US as much as when other countries refuse to play by our rules. We brand such countries as enemies and do whatever we can to undermine them.

The US has a long, dubious, and bloody rap sheet when it comes to meddling in the internal affairs of Central and South American nations. What’s interesting about this latest fixation on Venezuela is that it comes hard on the heels of our softening toward Cuba.

///

Those with any understanding and appreciation of American history have called these times the Second Gilded Age. It’s an era of stunning, staggering inequality of wealth and ostentatious displays of consumption. Steve Lopez, veteran columnist with the LA Times, recently did a piece about LA real estate of the highest end variety – the sort of “properties” that sell for $35, $50, and even upwards of $100 million bucks. Apparently, the global rich are pouring money into LA real estate, buying and tearing down and building bigger, grander palaces. The real estate peddler who took Lopez on a tour through Beverly Hills claimed the boom was good for the city’s coffers, meaning, I suppose, that his conscience was clear because he was just giving people what they want. Besides, Skid Row isn’t visible from the Hills.

The same thing happens here on the Platinum Coast, albeit on a smaller scale. Even during the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, houses in SB were being remodeled and renovated, and the market never dived as it did elsewhere, proving, as if such proof were needed, that owning a piece of the American Riviera is as good as owning gold; this  helps to explain why new buildings around town are shoehorned into tiny lots. Every foot of gilded ground must be exploited.

Which isn’t good news for those of us with normal jobs and incomes. This wasn’t a great week for my wife and I as we discovered that we owe the IRS and the Franchise Tax board some money. Frankly, this sent me into a mental tailspin for a couple of days, but I eventually stopped feeling sorry for myself. We’ll pay what we owe, we always do. The tax bill did get me thinking about SB and how people crack the nut every month in order to live here. Are they cheating on their taxes, working off the books, selling drugs, trafficking in contraband?

///

It’s officially spring, or so says the calendar, time of renewal and growth, though growth – at least in the sense of vines and flowers and grass – may be hard to come by with the ongoing drought. We have a year’s supply of water, maybe less. I can’t understand why the authorities haven’t instituted mandatory rationing. Perhaps they fear scaring tourists away. I fear the day when I turn on the tap and nothing comes out.

Forever Lost or Waiting to be Discovered?

“They used their wealth to seduce and demoralize institutions of popular government until those instruments were weakened beyond repair – or even worse, until those instruments became the means of disinheriting and disempowering the people…” Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence

As usual, the news of the world is bad and getting worse. The legislature of the state of Wisconsin is full of nut-jobs, and it looks like Wisconsin will be joining the ranks of right-to-work-for-less states. Thanks largely to John Boehner, the US Congress was recently turned into a mega-stage for the re-election campaign of Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu. Bibi is Israel’s Dick Cheney. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb. I will give Bibi this much – he has enormous balls. To thumb your nose at the benefactor without which Israel can’t survive takes a big, hefty pair.

Crazy shit.

Reading the news depresses me, so I counter with Alice Walker, a writer, and activist, who manages to see the world for the weeping sore that it is and still remain optimistic about the future. When it all becomes too much and my brain is overloaded with doom and gloom, Walker shines a light and gives me hope. When my son is acting the fool and making impulsive choices, Walker reminds me to be patient, to pause, to withhold judgment.

I’m reading Steve Fraser’s The Age of Acquiescence, a fantastic history of protest in these United States. I was eager to read this book after seeing Fraser interviewed by Bill Moyers. Neoliberal class warfare may seem like a new thing, but Fraser reminds us that it has been a part of America since Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton offered competing visions of what this country should become. Since the opening of this republic, the wealthy have sought to rig the game in their favor, to tilt the playing field, purchase the loyalty of legislators and judges, and use the power of the state to protect their property and privilege from the lower classes. The rich and powerful want a government robust enough to protect their interests, but not so robust as to interfere in their business.

We forget the impassioned debates, the marches and strikes, the violence, and bloodshed that animated the masses in Chicago and New York City and Cleveland and Detroit. Lacking a natural aristocracy like so many countries of the Old World, the masses in this country didn’t know their place in the scheme of things, and so the poor and the working poor frequently rose up and filled the streets and rattled the gilded gates of the ruling class. Capitalism itself was a frequent target, the system that by its very nature created stupendous wealth for a select few and widespread misery for the unfortunate majority.

The urge to pick up a rock or a paving stone or a torch or a loaded rifle in order to seek redress was more powerful in those bygone days; workers are cowed now, defeated by decades of trade, monetary, and government policy that has once again tilted the field in favor of those who have the most. Organized labor is impotent, and, in many cases, incompetent. Distracted by our cell phones and the faux dramas playing on our flat screen TV’s, most of us have accepted, with nary a whimper of protest, the reality of working harder for less, of doing worse than our parents and leaving our children with diminished choices.

Is the outrage we once felt and reacted to when confronted with gross social injustice forever lost? 

You tell me.