Under the Rainbow

“There is nothing good in the world that does not have some filth in its origin.” Anton Chekov

It’s raining here on the Platinum Coast of California, a welcome occurrence in the midst of a horrendous drought. The trees and ground open wide. The gutters run. My old Honda Civic will be washed clean.

I haven’t written anything for several days. I wonder what is happening in Fukushima, Japan. How much contamination is flowing into the Pacific Ocean? Why doesn’t the media talk about Fukushima? What is going on with the cleanup effort and what has become of all the people who had to be relocated? I think about the photographs I saw of black bags filled with radioactive debris and soil. Where are those bags now?

In the US our attention is focused on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the Iowa caucuses, the halftime show at the Super Bowl, and whatever trivia the corporate media deems essential for us to know. Opinion matters but facts don’t count for much. Don’t like the hard cold facts? Simply ignore them.

Like all those black bags in Fukushima. Can we simply jam our heads in the sand and refuse to see or care? Sure, we do it all the time. We collectively forget, until the next time, and then we act surprised, like such a terrible thing has never happened before. The human species enjoys playing with fire, rolling the dice, betting heavy against long odds.

Rain falls, I think of my responsibilities and obligations, debts, errors, miscues, fuck-ups, folly and for some reason unknown to me I think of Henry Miller and Anton Chekov; I see Miller standing at the edge of a cliff in Big Sur, looking out on the Pacific with his hands on his hips. Chekov is sitting at his desk in a smoky, dimly lit room, a pen in his hand and a faraway look in his eyes. The artist shies neither from the beauty or the horror of the world. Miller turns from the cliff edge, Chekov puts pen to paper. Which is the stronger urge, to create or to destroy?

Navigate broken sidewalks, crumbling stairs, rickety scaffolding, peer through broken windows, step over a child’s shoe and a deck of cards, a syringe and a pile of cigarette butts. Rats scratch inside the walls, gnaw on wire and drywall. The rat, the cockroach and the crow are true survivors; when we are long gone, they will still be here, sorting through our detritus, running through our monuments, and taking up permanent residence in our holy places.

The wind gusts, yanking the eucalyptus trees in the yard this way and that, the wind chimes talk fast, and the sun ducks behind the clouds. There is a rainbow around here somewhere.

The Obama Legacy

“We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 1967

Obama has made his last State of the Union speech, and of course he reports that the union is strong. When was the last time an American president claimed otherwise? Obama might have told the truth and admitted that the union is troubled, unequal, and full of discontented, frightened citizens, but that would make him a leader rather than a politician dedicated to preserving the status quo.

And one key to preserving the status quo is to repeat myths, half-truths, and of course, outright, bald-faced lies. Thus, the state of our union is strong and the wars we wage are just; our enemies are evil, hell-bent on our destruction; the economy is humming along (even if all the gains go to the wealthy); Americans are the chosen people, the last best hope for the world, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good political speech (although I passed on this one) and without doubt Obama is a gifted orator. After all, his rhetorical gift is what brought him to  widespread attention in 2004, and his ability on the stump was one reason he captured the presidency only four years later. The problem with Obama is that his actions and policies rarely measure up to his rhetoric.

Obama began abandoning the voters who got him to the White House the minute his first Inaugural address was over. People forget that Obama surrounded himself with Clinton-era retreads, and awful, deceitful people like Timothy Geithner, or corporate workhorses like Eric Holder. This was a clear signal, very early on, about whose interests Obama was looking after.

The rich and powerful never had anything to fear from the Obama Administration.

I voted for the man, only the one time, and within a year was totally disillusioned. Like millions of others, I had been duped by the rhetoric.

How will history measure Obama’s presidency? That depends of course on who tells the tale. For instance, Obama is given credit by many mainstream types for being the president who got Osama bin Laden. Some accounts are so rah-rah they make it seem that it was Obama himself who stormed bin Laden’s compound and shot the arch terrorist dead. Let’s get real for a minute. The US invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, quickly overran the Taliban and supposedly had bin Laden cornered in the Tora Bora mountains, only to see him escape into the hinterlands and vanish -- for ten years! -- despite being the most wanted man in the world, target #1 of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, NSC and Naval Intelligence. And here’s the kicker: for much of those 10 years, bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to our staunch ally in the War on Terror, Pakistan. Why did this heroic execution take so long?

And how about Obama’s doublespeak when it comes to government transparency? He claimed that his administration would be the most open and transparent in history -- until information leaked and then Obama showed his true colors, unleashing the full force and power of the government against whistleblowers and journalists like Jeffrey Sterling and James Risen.

History will, or should, record that Obama was for a time Executioner in Chief, deciding who would die by remote-controlled drone strike in the badlands of Yemen, Afghanistan or Pakistan, without formal charges ever being filed, without trial or any kind of due process. Perhaps some of the selected targets were terrorists, but many were not, and in either case, innocents were murdered. If any nation on this planet (except Israel, of course, which can pretty much murder whoever it wants without consequence) arrogated to itself the right to murder people beyond its own borders, the United States would bellow to the heavens about international law and sovereign territory. In other words, we would have a shit fit.

Obama frittered away his congressional majorities in his first term. He had a window of time to act boldly, but he choose to act cautiously; he allowed his political opponents to seize control of the national agenda. And then he lost his majorities and with them any hope of getting much done against a dysfunctional Congress. Granted, Obama got the Affordable Care Act done, but if this doesn’t lead to a single-payer system like Medicare for all -- the only sensible, equitable, humane system --  Obama’s victory is hollow.

Since the nation is celebrating the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, it may be instructive to examine Obama’s accomplishments through the lens of the three evils MLK enumerated not long before he was gunned down: militarism, poverty, and racism. The War on Terror is now in its 15th year. Along with Iraq, Libya and Syria are in ruins. Obama has prosecuted the war with fervor, backpedaled on his promise to end the American occupation of Afghanistan (we’re still there) and as of this writing, failed to close our offshore penitentiary at Guantanamo. I will say that Obama deserves credit for negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran. While it seems hypocritical to me that Israel is allowed to stockpile nuclear weapons, and Iran is sanctioned for its peaceful nuclear program, it was right to engage Iran rather than isolate Iran.

Income inequality has not lessened under Obama, not that it could since he has essentially followed the same economic policies as his predecessor. The gap between wealthy and poor,  haves and have nots, continues to widen, with more and more wealth -- and power -- concentrating in fewer hands. The middle class is on life support. Although the government reports that millions of jobs have been created during Obama’s term, we should ask for details about those jobs. Are they permanent or temporary, full time or part time, do they provide fringe benefits, and what do they pay -- a living wage or a precarious one? 

Obama claimed early in his presidency that we had entered a post-racial era. Wrong. Racism is alive and well in America, and even Obama himself has been the target of racial animus and disrespect. The numbers of young African-American males shot and killed by white policemen on the streets of this country are striking. Black lives remain cheap and disposable; more often than not, despite evidence and testimony, white police officers walk away from fatal shootings, scot free.

From now until he leaves the White House for a financially lucrative post-residency, Obama and his people will devote themselves to burnishing his image. There will be a library and a foundation, books and speeches. The reality of Obama’s time in office will never measure up to the PR, and by MLK’s standards, his legacy is mixed indeed. 

Big Short, Big Shaft

“The right will always invoke an enemy within. They will insist on a distinction between real Americans and those who say they are but aren’t. This latter is your basic nativist amalgam of people of the wrong color, recent immigration or incorrect religious persuasion.” E.L. Doctorow, Notes on Art & Politics

My wife and I saw the Big Short a few days ago, a fine, clever film based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis about the collapse of the American housing market in 2008. This calamity, engineered by the unfettered greed of the big banks, legions of mortgage brokers and real estate hucksters, with assistance from the Federal Reserve, Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s, and gutted regulatory agencies, caused widespread misery in this country – homes, jobs, and savings obliterated practically overnight – that is still being felt today.  

The Big Short captures the exuberance of the gamblers – those clever and cunning people who figured out how to bet against the American housing market and win – as well as the rapacity of the financial industry. As we all know, or should, the major banks, along with AIG, received millions of taxpayer dollars to remain solvent. In fact, in a perverse twist that could only happen in a country held captive by its financial industry, some of the banks emerged larger and more powerful than they were before the collapse.

I remember thinking at the time how glorious it was to be an American banker. You billed yourself a capitalist, praised “free markets” and the glory of being unfettered by annoying government oversight and regulation; you made risky, even criminal wagers on complicated financial instruments, and then, when the house of straw imploded, took money from the government with both hands as if being rescued by the hapless taxpayers was your divine right.

Is this a magnificent country or what?

In another perverse irony, former executives from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms were tapped to lead the nation out of the wilderness. In a world flipped on its head, the thieves became the police. How they must have laughed as they shuttled from Wall Street boardrooms to the corridors of power in Washington.

It wasn’t so easy for folks in the states hammered hardest by the fraud, including Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and California. Mortgage loans were easy to obtain before the bubble burst, all you needed was a pulse and a signature and the home of your dreams was yours along with the expectation that its value would appreciate forever and ever. When reality reasserted itself, millions of people were ruined.

Eight years later, the crash is almost forgotten. Once the Occupy Movement was silenced, 2008 has been out of sight, out of mind. The Obama Administration and the mainstream media have pushed the narrative of recovery, of job creation and a rising stock market. Isn’t capitalism wonderful? Oh, how the invisible hand corrects itself. Try that line out on the man who lost his house, his job and his pension. What we have in America now is socialism for the wealthy and austerity for the rest, and when the wealthy and powerful fuck things up, the poor and weak pay for it.

Eight years on and an organization called Keep Your Home California still runs TV ads promising help for homeowners on the brink of foreclosure.

The Big Short might as easily been titled, The Big Shaft.