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. 

Rant: May the Sun Never Set

Occasionally, and to my detriment, I try and wrap my head around the news. This is always a humbling experience. My old brain can’t keep up when one of the talking heads on ABC or CBS darts from the problem of spent nuclear fuel rods to Charlie Sheen’s latest antics without stopping for breath.

Here’s what I know for sure on this fine March day: America is a wonderful country because we treat our largest corporations like superstars.

First of all, thanks to some scary characters in black robes who call themselves the Supreme Court, corporations have the same free speech rights as persons, meaning they can spend tons of cash to influence the political process in their favor. When it comes to buying legislators, the old adage is true: you get what you pay for. And since many American corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, they can buy a bunch of goodies. Think of the Capitol as a Costco or a Wal-Mart superstore. If it helps, you can also think of it as an upscale whorehouse.

Second, we’re really, really generous to our corporations when it comes to taxes, so much so that we allow the majority to pay no tax whatsoever; zero, zilch, nada, even when, as in the case of Bank of America, they have been recipients of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money. Full benefits, no give back; Midas himself would definitely approve.

General Electric is another happy passenger on the no-tax gravy train. GE makes super-sized profits from our endless foreign wars and from outsourcing its manufacturing to low-wage nations. When all is said and done, and an army of CPA’s and lawyers finish their chores, GE pays nary a nickel in US taxes. Even better for GE, its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, serves on the President’s Economic Recovery Board. Wink. Wink. I’m sure the welfare of working Americans is one of Immelt’s chief concerns. Wink. Wink. Giggle.

Thanks, Mr. Obama, for your undying support of the ruling elite, the status quo and CEO’s. We love you, man.

What else is wonderful about the red, white and blue? Let’s see, Detroit, once the 4th largest city in the land, home of the Big Three US automakers and good paying jobs with benefits and union representation for thousands of middle-class workers, is dying. Grand office buildings and sprawling industrial plants sit empty, rotting from within and without, pillaged for scrap metal and copper wire. In the name of corporate efficiency and global competitiveness, we allowed our 4th largest city to become a landscape fit for ghosts and feral dogs.

We’re #1! Who can deny it?

Ah, this land of the free and home of the brave, this blessed fruited plain where all things are possible for our corporate masters in their glass towers and secure residential enclaves. The richest 400 people in our land control more wealth than the bottom 150 million people – combined. Let’s hear it for meritocracy!

We are edging ever closer to achieving Ronald Reagan’s wettest dream. Dutch’s political heirs – real and imagined – are well on their way to gutting our best institutions, cannibalizing our states, and getting an oppressive, overreaching government off the backs of the people. Woo-hoo!

Hell, yes, our cup overflowith with God’s bounty. What other nation can simultaneously wage two and a half wars against Muslim nations? Can the French pull off this impressive hat-trick? No way! The Brits? Impossible! The Russians? Laughable! Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Who’s next? What band of ragtag revolutionaries will dare challenge the military might of the US of A? As Mr. T was fond of saying: “I pity the fools.” Cross our line in the sand and we will rain death and destruction upon you. Shock and awe, hammer and tong, cruise missile and cluster bomb!

Hey, Gaddafi, this next cruise missile is brought to you by General Electric. We bring tin-horn dictators to their knees. Booyah!

Hot damn! May the sun never set on the American Empire.

Pissed On, Pissed Off

I feel like I’m pissing into a cold headwind, and I wonder if you feel the same. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs each raked in more than $3 billion in profits in the third quarter. Stop a moment and take that in. $3 billion each. In the fallout from the financial crisis last year, some firms, like Goldman and Morgan, actually got bigger -- and with transfusions of no-strings-attached taxpayer money -- stronger, while others emerged weaker, less able to compete. Incredibly, financial power in this country is now consolidated into even fewer hands, making firms like Goldman and Morgan “too big to fail, ever,” which is almost the same thing as a license to print money. These firms now have nearly unlimited latitude to take enormous risks because they know that Washington politicians will always intervene to save their bacon.

A year after the global financial system nearly plunged over the cliff, the boom is on for politically connected firms whose alumni prowl the corridors of Congress or hold influential positions in the Obama Administration. Of course, bust is the flip side of boom and for millions of Americans the bust shows no sign of abating. Obama’s stimulus package did little for working Americans once Congress was done gutting it and re-arranging its priorities to placate nay-saying Republicans. Unemployment remains stuck in the double-digits, state governments struggle to provide services to a growing population of needy human beings, and small businesses scrimp to make ends meet. Wall Street may be celebrating its recovery with champagne brunches and gargantuan bonuses, but Main Street is still eating Spam and waiting for the kind of assistance that was lavished on the financial industry.

Don’t hold your breath. The real deal is jobs and wages, putting people to work, but don’t expect to hear much about either on ABC, NBC or Fox – or from the Obama Administration for that matter. All mainstream media outlets care about is Wall Street and runaway balloons.

The joke is on you and me, on every taxpayer, and every person who still believes the American Dream is attainable.

What’s the average wage slave to do? The political system is indifferent to our needs and desires, unaccountable even as we foot the bill, and the financial system is rigged against us. As the poet Allen Ginsberg is reported to have said, “You can’t win, can’t break even, and can’t even quit the game.”

But I can sure feel the spray in my face.

Absolution of the Titans

I admire the Titans of American Finance and you should too. In the Great American Casino, otherwise known as our Economy, they’re the winners and the rest of us are the losers. Our best and brightest leave the finest universities in the land, flock to Wall Street in search of wealth and power; these are clever, cunning, driven men and women who go after what they want with the same single-minded obsession with which Hannibal Lecter sought human flesh. The Titans buy low and sell high, own beach front homes in the Hamptons and luxurious apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, travel first class, own season tickets for the Yankees and the Giants, and pay for it all with platinum credit cards. Even low on the totem pole Titans make as much in a year as the average American wage slave makes in a decade.

Ah, the mystical world of high finance, stocks, bonds, derivatives, numbers and symbols sliding across tickers from New York to Hong Kong, unintelligible to the untrained eye, full of portent and opportunity for those with a penchant for risk and a wad of other people’s money to monkey with. These are Gordon Gecko’s heirs, knights of Capitalism, who ride alone along the great black river; they ask no quarter and of course give none, particularly to lazy welfare queens or unemployed lesbians. They see the world in black & white, good & evil, Mutt & Jeff, Ozzie & Harriet, Astaire & Rogers.

Like Gecko the Titans are suave, smooth, savvy and savage. Gecko may have gone down in the end, but he went out shouting, “Greed is still good.” We loved Gordon Gecko and everything he stood for much more than we ever loved Horatio Alger and his tedious tale of hard work, honesty and right living.

Right. Hell, yes. We’re Americans and we want what we want when we want it. Delayed gratification is for suckers and tight-assed kill joys. Life is short and death will not be denied, so grab the gusto and let the bulldog roll.

The Titans are master alchemists who turn coal into diamonds, single family homes into ATM machines, bogus mortgages made in Cleveland into Collateralized Debt Obligations sold in Mumbai.

Can you pull off a trick like that? Of course not, which is why the Federal government isn’t rushing to your rescue. Or mine. We’re the grunts of the American Casino, the water carriers, the serfs and sharecroppers, the tenement dwellers. Our purpose is to toil for meager wages, to save none of what we earn, and to rack up as much debt as possible. Sure, we’re free to bitch about the unfairness of it all, throw stones and beer bottles at the mansion on the hill, pin our hopes on political candidates who promise to level the battle field and repair the tattered American Dream, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, the Titans are still more important than we will ever be.

Thus, the sins and crimes of the Titans are absolved. Instead of punishment, they are given coins snatched from our pockets and the pockets of our children, the pockets of their children, and the pockets of children yet unborn. The great Casino is too important to fail; the slot machines must clang and jingle just as the roulette wheel must spin and the loaded dice tumble.

Too big to fail, too cool for the catwalk. It may be good to be King, but being a Titan of Finance is many times better; kings are occasionally beheaded or contract syphilis and go insane, Titans are untouchable.