It's Finally Over and We Lost

I watched it.

I shouldn’t have.

When it was mercifully over I felt sick to my stomach.

I understand that most of what I was taught to believe about the United States is myth. When the fables of American exceptionalism are stripped away, what remains reveals that this is a nation built on racism and genocide, imperial conquest, double-dealing and hypocrisy. This is harsh but inescapable. Recognizing the truth about one’s country doesn’t imply or prove hatred of one’s country.

Not a single direct question in any of the “debates” about climate change, the most urgent issue facing the world. This is inexcusably irresponsible.

Deemed more important is a false question about the national debt and entitlement programs. First of all, Americans pay into Social Security and Medicare paycheck by paycheck, with the promise that when the time arrives, as it will for all of us, these programs will be there to insure that no person that has worked his or her entire life is forced to live in poverty. Conservatives have railed against Social Security and Medicare for decades, and now they are routinely joined by corporate Democrats like Hillary Clinton, all shouting in unison for austerity measures.

It’s total bullshit, of course. If this country stopped pouring trillions of dollars into the Pentagon, we would have more than enough to fund Medicare for all and to insure that Social Security lives up to its implicit promise. Year after year polls show that the majority of Americans want to expand these programs, and year after year the political class ignores the will of the majority.

Was I surprised that Donald Trump is completely ignorant about abortion?

No more than to hear Hillary Clinton blame Russia for trying to tip the election in favor of Trump. Hillary declared that Russia -- the highest levels of the Kremlin, mind you, harkening back to the Cold War -- is behind the cyber attacks that led to the latest WikiLeaks disclosures. Clinton stated that all 17 of America’s intelligence agencies have confirmed that Russia is behind the leaks. My first question is: do we really need 17 intelligence agencies? And these are, I suppose, the same crack agencies that spent more than a decade searching the globe for Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man? Couldn’t find him anywhere...

And speaking of that great bogeyman bin Laden, Clinton twice said that bin Laden had been brought to justice. Strange, I don’t remember bin Laden being charged and tried in an American court or any court for that matter. Didn’t America’s brave operatives assassinate bin Laden and dump his body into the sea? In an age when the American president decides who shall live and who shall die by remote controlled drone, I suppose you can say that bin Laden was brought to justice.  

If Russia is behind the cyber attacks and attempting to subvert our election all I can ask my country is: how does it feel to have the tables turned, to be on the receiving end for a change?

Some of the exchanges were merely amusing, ample proof, as if any were needed, of the utter debasement of our democratic process, like when Trump insisted that nobody respects women more than he does. Or when Clinton defended the money laundering operation that is the Clinton Foundation.

It was a sad night for America. I shouldn’t have watched, but I did.

The Sophistication of Our Corruption

“Or, to put it more dramatically, the richest 400 Americans own more assets than the bottom 150 million.” Mark Blyth, Austerity: The history of a dangerous idea.

Even Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, can’t provide a coherent definition of what socialism means. Bill Maher tried to coax a concrete answer out of Sanders last week, but all Maher got for his effort was a monologue about free health care and free tuition at public colleges and universities. Maher’s audience approved of this answer, but the question deserves a fuller response.

I don’t have much hope for Bernie’s campaign, as I’ve written here before, because in the end Hillary Clinton has too much campaign cash and media love for Sanders to overcome. Plus, when you bill yourself as a socialist in America – even a democratic socialist – you will be demonized. Americans have been conditioned to fear socialists, communists, leftists and Marxists.

What I want to hear Sanders talk about, in the time left before he folds his tent and exits the field, is the need for a counterweight against corporate power. Without robust government regulation and monitoring, capitalism inevitably produces a relative few spectacular winners and a staggering number of losers, which is the sad pass we have arrived at today. Years of tax cuts and tax breaks and other legal means of tax avoidance for corporations and wealthy individuals has created conditions typical in what used to be called “banana republics”; a handful of wealthy people who own practically everything and segregate themselves from the unwashed masses, a professional class that lives comfortably, a tiny “middle-class” and the working poor and dirt poor.

The only way to have any semblance of economic fairness for the majority is to deliberately engineer it. That means government policy, rules, regulations, and laws that can’t be circumvented. I appreciate services that only government can deliver on a mass scale, like clean water, breathable air, decent public schools, single-payer health care, national parks, safe bridges and freeways, courts that give average citizens a legitimate means of redress, and a safety net robust enough to smooth the jagged edges of capitalism; I like knowing that the foods and medicines I consume are safe, free from chemicals and genetically-modified ingredients.

Of course we have to pay for all these social benefits. That entails taxing the super wealthy and corporations, it means revising the byzantine tax code and shrinking the national security apparatus and the military. What might have been done to help American citizens with all the money we have wasted fighting a losing war in Afghanistan, a war we started and cannot finish? Think of the opportunities lost and human lives ruined.

This feels to me like a dangerous time for the American Republic. The mechanisms of our government are rusted because the political system has been perverted by money -- money that buys lawyers, lobbyists, think tanks and PR flacks – and rendered completely incapable of addressing critical problems. Citizens barely matter any more, we are paid lip service by the powerful and our legitimate needs are ignored because the political and corporate elites know that the masses are unorganized and easily divided. We are fed a steady diet of horseshit about the majesty of the free market, freedom, and American exceptionalism.

News flash: America is exceptional only in terms of the sophistication of its corruption.

Murder One

“Behind the veil of Oz, there is nothing but bluff.” Christopher Hitchens

My wife is watching the Oscars. Of the nominated films, we only saw Django Unchained and Silver Linings Playbook; I enjoyed the former and thought the latter was so-so; Jennifer Lawrence, sorry, I don’t see the reason for all the hype about your performance. Queen of Young Hollywood say the industry parasites and celebrity gawkers.

Whatever.

Chelsea Football Club lost to Manchester City today, 2-nil. My boys played poorly, conceded too much space, and lost the battle for midfield. I can’t stand interim manager Rafa Benitez – he’s an arrogant poser, a walking travesty who should never have been given the reins of Chelsea Football Club.

But the trials of Chelsea FC is not what preoccupies me tonight; I’m thinking about technology, all the fabulous gizmos and gadgets at our disposal: tablets, smart phones, super thin laptops, flat screen TV’s, wireless access points, social media, instant this, real time that.

Back in the day we thought technology would liberate us from drudgery and tedium, increase our leisure time, but it’s obvious we missed an off-ramp on the way to the Promised Land. Americans have technology galore, but what we don’t have is the leisure time to enjoy it. 

Americans are work beasts. We put in more hours on the job than any people on the planet, take fewer vacation days and, when we do get away, we remain tethered to the office by cell phone, e-mail, text message or social media. We listen to voice mail messages while standing in line for the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland; tap out e-mail responses on the beach at Cancun; become apoplectic if the Wifi service at the Red Roof Inn doesn’t work.

Ironically, all this frenzied labor isn’t making us richer, at least not those of us stuck in the lower middle class where more often than not we walk a paycheck-to-paycheck tightrope.

Woe to the family that makes a misstep.

We’re still clawing our way back from the financial meltdown of 2008 and the millions of jobs that vanished like morning fog; unemployment remains persistently high, wages stubbornly flat. Not surprisingly, fewer people doing more work pushes productivity off the chart, but the spoils of our bounty flow to the owners and investors, the financiers behind the velvet curtain, who win when we lose and profit by our misery.

The wages of American workers have remained stagnant for decades and the employer sponsored benefit plans we once counted on have either disappeared altogether or become so paltry as to be meaningless; we’re on our own in ways our parents never were. 

How did it come to this? When did working people lose the war of ideas, and by that I mean the idea of shared prosperity in the workplace. The Fat Cats and their media mouthpieces and lobbyists flipped our world on its head, seized the national narrative and made it their own; capital, they declared, is more important than labor; wealth is more valued than work; the rich are more deserving than the poor. They bought the politicians and judges and rigged the system so perversely that the more workers produced, the less reward workers received.

It seems to me that the revolution started with Reagan, but it was a revolution of the velvet variety because there was little sustained protest from the working class; while the Fat Cats and money-changers picked our pockets, we argued about gun control and abortion, evolution and creationism, Monica Lewinsky and Bubba Clinton, and we swallowed enormous quantities of 100-proof Kool-Aid that made many of us believe that the answer to a better tomorrow was to look out only for ourselves and our own interests.

In this diminished and heartless era working people – when mentioned in the national debate at all – are considered disposable, bought at the lowest possible price and dumped when cheaper versions are found. Money is mobile and corporations have no loyalty to anything but profit.

It’s a class war pure and simple, rich and super rich against the middle class and working poor, and the numbers on the big scoreboard don’t lie. To use a football analogy, the rich are like Manchester United and the poor are like Queens Park Rangers – in other words, no contest. Police, firefighters, nurses, teachers, postal clerks and food inspectors are treated as parasitic drains on state and local governments, grossly overpaid, underworked dolts who contribute nothing to the common good.

That’s the lie repeated over and over by lazy reporters and corporate shills.

Our great nation can afford to spend more on its military than all other developed countries combined, but it can’t afford to pay workers a living wage or provide them humane benefits. We can afford to cut taxes for the wealthy again and again and again, but when it comes to the huddled masses, we bow before the Austerity gods. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, Scott Walker and the Koch Brothers demand the destruction of public employee unions; we must slash their pensions, suppress their wages – or face Armageddon.

As the Oscars drone on in the background, I’m thinking, with a mixture of wonder and disgust, that the greatest transfer of wealth in human history and the premeditated murder of the American Dream happened during my lifetime.