The Isolation Diaries No. 25

“This is like a repeat of 2008, where Congress is dumping staggering sums of money into the hands of Wall Street thieves.” Chris Hedges. 

I spend three and a half hours in the deserted office. I feel clumsy in my own work space. Surrounded by familiar things, I still can’t work at my normal efficiency. Every task before me feels monumental. It’s one of those hit-the-wall days, a low ebb. They happen in bleak times like this. Stress, anxiety, worry, boredom, singularly, or all at once. I feel impatient, harried by my thoughts. When I return home I’m edgy with my wife. Has the apartment shrunk in my short absence? 

We’re at a stand-off with our 18-year-old daughter, who continues to blame her parents for the total disruption of her young, important life. She can’t hang with her friends or see her boyfriend; she asks if she can visit him, we tell her, no, not unless you’re prepared to move in with him. No going to and fro like Heidi Klum skipping down the runway. Uneasy truce. On the positive side the portable AC unit my wife ordered arrived. Our defense against the stifling days to come. My poor wife suffers in the heat, it wipes her out; fans don’t cut it. We have a swamp cooler that helps, but when it’s 85 or 90 outside it feels like 100 inside. 

What do you fall back on when you feel empty inside? Where do you place your faith? God or man? Religion never did it for me, but men frighten me more than God, because they’re here, now. Is there more good than evil in humankind? 

Back to normal, back to normal, back to normal the drumbeat sounds. Back to normal? No, that’s a mirage. An economic bomb is about to hit. We’re about to learn how hard it is to build a foundation that can stand the test of time, good and bad, droughts and floods, wars and hurricanes, earthquakes and fires, and how easy it is to destroy a foundation that has been deliberately allowed to rot. The odds of a swift recovery are very long, this isn’t 2008/09. We allowed that golden opportunity to angle the economy -- just a tiny bit -- toward average people and away from the wealthy to pass in favor of the status quo. Obama chose the wealthy over the people. The rich got richer, remember? Executive bonuses and stock buybacks. Even greater wealth inequality.Working people either lost or stayed the same. Had our economy been stronger prior to the pandemic, the hurt now would be less drastic. (By stronger I don’t mean a bigger bull market and hefty corporate profits, I mean more equal in terms of wealth, more equitable sharing of the spoils, far less precarity.) No person allowed to die of hunger or neglect. No person unhoused. No person without access to medical care. No person without access to clean water. No tents on the streets of Los Angeles, no Skid Row, ever, anywhere. Let’s start with FDR’s 4 Freedoms, see how those notions can be improved and expanded upon. Let’s revive the idea of social justice. We need a new definition of profit that takes into account owners, workers, and the planet. You can make money, lots of it, but not on the backs of workers, and not to the detriment of the planet. The Pentagon all-you-can-eat buffet must end; wars of choice that never end must stop. Unbridled corporate power must be checked. Our political system must be reformed, big money and soft money and dark money rooted out, voting rights expanded and secured, and the war on the poor that manifests in mass incarceration, ended. Only then might we stand a chance against what’s barreling toward us. 

Yeah, it was a day. I guess this is what I fall back on, playing with the word. It’s funny to think that six weeks ago our routines, our lives, seemed solid and predictable, but of course that was an illusion. Life is more fluid, especially in a society like ours, gilded on the surface and rotten to its core. This realization is humbling, and infuriating. A line from a Springsteen song comes to mind, from his album The Ghost of Tom Joad: “You get used to anything and it becomes your life.”

What stupid thing did Trump say today? What was the lie of the day? 

What happened to the anti-war movement in the US?

If America had a robust labor movement and a semi-level regulatory playing field, would we all enjoy universal health care now? 

The big money boys put the New Deal to the sword. Now they are busy looting the treasury. They do their best work in broad daylight, out in the open, under the glare of TV cameras. We get $1200, the dust left over from the frenzy of theft orchestrated by corporate lobbyists and their political cronies. 

Dust to dust. The human condition. I take a snifter of Irish whiskey out on the deck and sit in my new recliner. As the evening quiet deepens, I sip whiskey and stare at the waxing crescent moon. I can’t believe how beautiful it looks. 

The Curse of Greed

“Financial extraction happens across the economy, from farming to health care to retail to manufacturing and beyond. The tools include building monopolies, using tax havens to cheat on tax bills, firms channeling profits not into productive investment but into buying back shares to boost share price…” Nick Shaxson, The Nation

I’m writing this early on Super Tuesday, though I may not post it for another few days. All eyes in the Democratic Party apparatus are trained on Joe Biden today, hoping his win in South Carolina -- the first primary Biden has ever won in three tries at the presidency -- will give him momentum, and eventually, the nomination. The Democrats are desperate for Biden to overtake Bernie Sanders, desperate to dodge the threat Sanders poses to the hegemony of the Clintonites and other hacks who enjoy power and privilege, desperate to avoid any serious critique of how the party has shafted working people and the poor for decades. 

I’ve lived and worked long enough now to see the horrific effects of neoliberal capitalism on workers, our children, our elderly, and the environment. When the corporate media loses its shit over Sanders I shake my head and wonder if any of the talking heads and sterile blabbers remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sanders only seems radical today because the United States has moved so far to the right since the New Deal era. By the values of that trying period, when capitalists had ruined the American economy, Sanders’ policy proposals are hardly radical, but to enact them would mean the hyper-rich and corporations must accept taking less of the spoils, and that is something they are unwilling to do. The rich have waged a brilliant and merciless 40-year-long war against the working-class and the poor, rigging the economy and the political system and the courts to their advantage. They’ve run the table.

Regardless of political, religious, racial, sexual or gender affiliation, rural or urban provenance, working people lost. We let the wealthy divide us and conquer us, anesthesize us with spectacle, smoke, mirrors, and magical thinking. As I’ve said on this blog many times before, since the tail end of the 1970’s, working people have taken a first-class beat down. 

The problem with Greed Capitalism is that it recognizes no limits, either moral or environmental. Accumulation becomes the be-all and end-all, until a handful of people control a majority of the world’s wealth. Through media outlets they own, they drill into us that this is perfectly natural, that they are extravagantly wealthy because they are extravagantly worthy. Through endless propaganda about the fairness and virtue of free-market capitalism they have convinced us that our lack of wealth is our own fault, the result of personal shortcomings, lack of vision and wherewithal to seize the reins of our own destiny. 

Greed isn’t good. Greed is a curse, a plague, an insidious and terminal virus. 

If only we chased justice as frantically as we chase wealth and power. But justice doesn’t hold out the promise of whiter teeth and unblemished skin, a long life of ease and luxury, private yachts, jets, penthouses in the clouds, and the power to compel others to do your bidding, take your orders, satisfy your whims, starve while you gorge yourself. Justice involves sacrifice and wisdom.  

Masters and slaves, ordained by God and Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. A few must rule, the rest must bow and beg. The poor make the long walk to the manor house, knock at the back door, beg for an audience with the Lord, and walk away, into the twilight, empty-handed. 

The Coward's Pulpit

The other day I was thinking about Franklin D. Roosevelt and his fireside chats that were broadcast on radio across the country. I’m not old enough to have heard FDR in real time, but I have heard recordings. That patrician voice coming from the box, families gathered around hungry for hope, some certainty in a time of economic hardship at home and growing turmoil in Europe and Asia. Roosevelt said he understood their worries and fears -- and people believed him. Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to lift people’s spirits and assure them that America would come out all right.

Then I thought of Donald J. Trump and how he abuses the most powerful bully pulpit on the planet, creating divisions between people, inciting others to follow their basest instincts, spreading falsehoods, and attacking anyone who challenges, contradicts or criticizes him. Has any American president since the turn of the 20th century used such coarse and imbecilic language as Trump does almost every day via Twitter? Has any American president in that same time threatened to bomb countries with whom the United States isn’t at war so cavalierly, as if the bombs will only harm the “bad guys,” never innocent men, women, and children? Has any American president been so obsessed with appearing strong? How many people has Trump called “weak” or “sad” or “pathetic” since he was inaugurated?

Trump World is a frightening, dystopian place ever on the verge of chaos, the border is porous and dangerous people are always breaching it, hell bent on mayhem, plunder, rape, and murder; other countries take advantage, refuse to play by our rules or show enough deference for our greatness; laws are onerous things for others to abide by; the media is dishonest; judges are biased; minorities are greedy. In Trump World we must fear the Other, the outside world, and each other. Strength must be our highest virtue, all else is subordinate. The weak are unworthy. Women should know their place and stay in it. Dissent of any kind is unpatriotic. Empathy and compassion are for suckers.

Echoes, faint perhaps, of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. If he could, Trump would purge the government of rivals and institute loyalty oaths -- not to the United States or its citizens -- to him.

Short Takes:

I’m delighted that the cruel Ayn Rand disciple, Paul Ryan, has decided to turn in his speaker’s gavel and retire to a lucrative career doing God-knows-what for the Koch Brothers. Good riddance to a true political hack.

Trump’s knee-jerk, shoot-from-the-hip response to a chemical attack in Syria, allegedly perpetrated by the Assad regime, who Trump referred to as an “animal,” is another example of his manifest unfitness for office. Nobody knows with anything approaching certainty who is responsible for the chemical attack. It could be the Assad regime, of course, but it could also be opponents of the government or some splinter group; the situation in Syria is very complicated and Trump’s stupidity is making a bad situation tense and dangerous.

Once again, Israel is getting away with murdering unarmed Palestinians. The Israeli propaganda machine works overtime to paint the protesters as tools of Hamas, an absurd but useful claim. As usual, the US corporate media turns a blind eye and deaf ear. The US must support Israel -- no matter what crimes the latter commits.

How does Sarah Huckabee Sanders sleep at night? All the lies she vomits up on behalf of Trump has to take a toll.

Hats off to football club AS Roma, who knocked FC Barcelona out of the Champions League tournament. Talk about David versus Goliath.

The 100 Day Nightmare

“Everything is public relations and public relations is make-believe.” I.F. Stone

Almost 100 days of the Trump regime. The marker is somewhat artificial, a measure without much meaning in the big scheme, but presidents and the media pay attention to it. To hear Trump tell it, his first 100 days have been fantastically successful, unprecedented, stupendous, almost FDR-like, loaded with monumental accomplishments that have already lifted America from the quagmire in which it has been stuck.

Reality paints a far different story of Trump’s first 100 days. Most of the silly promises Trump spouted on the campaign trail lay broken on the White House lawn. Signing executive orders is not the same as passing legislation, but those signing ceremonies make fine photo opportunities for Trump, and provide the illusion of momentum, of accomplishment, and Trump clearly relishes them; almost as much as he enjoys his weird campaign-style rallies before friendly, fawning audiences. The adulation junkie needs these periodic fixes.  

Read almost any transcript of an interview with Trump and you quickly realize how inarticulate and ignorant the man is, how incapable of coherent thought; he’s nothing but a showman, carnival barker, and fraud; this was true the day Trump announced his bid for the presidency, and every day thereafter, but because his campaign reality show produced such bounty for the corporate media his idiotic bleatings were treated seriously.

In less than 100 days Trump has degraded the office of president, made it tawdry and risible. No, the office hasn’t changed the man as many pundits predicted, the man is changing the office. If many countries around the globe were not also lurching to the far right, proposing barriers, nationalism, attacking immigrants, the United States under Trump would be a laughing stock. But Trump has company, kindred souls, who favor heavy-handed solutions to every conceivable problem; these are strange, unsettling times all over the world and it’s damn hard not to feel pissed off all day every day.

Despair is easy, resistance hard. Trump and his merry kleptocrats came out with a tax proposal today, and, lo and behold, it’s at bottom all out class warfare, designed to make the rich even richer. Wonderful. Trump claims tax cuts for the rich will produce jobs and bounty for the rest of us, a myth the GOP has peddled for decades. Far too many of us bought this load of steaming BS, and continued to buy it when the evidence of its failure was all around, easy to see. Shame on us for falling asleep at the wheel and allowing these greedy bastards to strip away our hard won gains. Now our democracy is in tatters, bought and paid for by corporations and Wall Street financiers, big banks, defense contractors, private prison operators, the rapacious pharmaceutical industry.

The will of the people? The powerful could care less because they know they have nothing to fear from the people.

It has been a long, long time since the people frightened America’s ruling class. Systems of surveillance and intimidation and control are many times more sophisticated now.

I’m tired and my head hurts. How bad will things get? How much pain, suffering and degradation will be heaped upon the masses? Wake up and the nightmare rages on, the broken empire lurches into another grim morning, snarling threats, pumping petrol into the death machine, ready for another run at its enemies, foreign and domestic, real and imagined.  

Last Train to the Gates of Hell

“Young Americans aren’t stupid. They can read the writing on the wall, and they recognize that our economy is broken, functioning for the affluent few at the expense of the many. And young Americans will be vital to producing structural political or economic change in the coming decades.” Anthony Dimaggio

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an aristocrat and member of the American oligarchy, but unlike contemporary oligarchs, he understood that if capitalists were left to their own devices they would destroy the economy and cause unrest among the masses. Many of the reforms and programs passed into being during FDR’s four terms were designed to save capitalism by blunting its rougher edges.

Today’s oligarchs lose no sleep worrying about capitalism’s rough edges. Cruelty is on display and it begins with Tiny Hands Trump who clearly believes the wealthy are not only better and more deserving than anyone else, but bear no responsibility for the less fortunate. The oligarchs no longer bother to hide behind a facade of concern for the masses, except, perhaps, during election campaigns when vague promises are made to voters. Trump played to the embattled white working class, men and women hammered by the neoliberal economic, trade, and monetary policies of the last 40 years, but once elected, Trump’s true colors emerged as he surrounded himself with Goldman Sachs alums and a host of capitalist vultures.

A terrible illness afflicts our society and as a result we are among the most harried, stressed out, insecure, worried, and drug-addled nations on the planet. We are two distinct nations, very similar to a developing country, extremely rich on one end, and a huge number of poor or destitute. America’s brand of capitalism is destroying America, ripping and tearing, puncturing vital organs, breaking bones. From the Powell Memo to business leaders in 1971, to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, the Crash of 2008, the apologetic administration of Barack Obama, to Trump and his gang of kleptocrats, the disease has spread, metastasized. Unbridled capitalism destroyed our manufacturing base, forced states to seek revenue through gambling schemes, casinos, lotteries; cities and states have paid ransom to corporate America in the form of tax relief and subsidies; public goods have been auctioned off for private gain, and national tragedies like what happened to New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina were exploited for corporate profit. Ideologues and media enablers told us that a financialized economy was THE ticket to prosperity for all, but the income gains have accrued to those who already own the most. The level of income inequality in America is staggering, immoral, untenable, and wrong. The plight of so many of our elderly citizens is a disgrace.

And Trump and his gang will only make economic suffering -- and all the social ills that go with that suffering -- worse.

I remember watching a snippet of a town hall meeting during the first George W. Bush administration. A woman told Bush that she had three jobs, to which the affable nitwit said something like “isn’t America great,” thinking perhaps that the woman was simply ambitious rather than desperate. Things have not improved since. Automation will eliminate more and more jobs, including, one day, truck drivers, bus drivers, cab drivers, a legion of retail workers, and many others. The capitalist drive to lower or altogether eliminate labor costs will never stop unless there are laws and regulations in place to force the capitalists to consider the human costs of their thirst for maximum profit.

I walked past the shuttered Macy’s department store on State Street in Santa Barbara the other day. Macy’s, along with Nordstrom’s, was for years an anchor in the Paseo Nuevo Mall. Across State Street sits another deserted space that once housed the restaurant Left At Albuquerque and after Albuquerque went under, Panino. The City Fathers and Mothers blame vacant retail space on the homeless who camp on the sidewalks and panhandle passersby, but there is something far deeper at work here; wages for workers have been flat for decades while people pay more for housing, medical care, and education, particularly in a city like Santa Barbara where rents are stratospheric and everything seems to cost more. The economy depends on consumers, but what is the logical outcome when consumers can no longer afford to consume? When jobs are part-time, contingent, low-wage, temporary, and without benefits?

American-style capitalism may be destroying us but that doesn’t mean we can have a serious, rational discussion about it; capitalism itself -- the entire bullshit system of cutthroat competition and individual gain -- is sacred, unassailable, and infallible. If we had any respect for history, for the concept of moderation in all things, we would recognize that we’ve been on this road before.

The difference this time may be that we are passengers on a speeding locomotive with no brakes, hurtling straight for the gates of Hell.  

As Martin Luther King Jr., put it many years ago, “Capitalism fails to realize that life is social.”