Obama-Vision

Obama has called for cutting the deficit, freezing government salaries, and even, cutting corporate taxes (most large corporations don't pay any), joining a throng of right-wingers, and also the Conservatives who took power in the UK not so long ago. But look what's happening in the UK in the wake of huge cuts to the UK government budget.

"It's not enough just to slam on the spending brakes. Measures that cut spending but killed demand would actually make matters worse," said Sir Richard Lambert, outgoing director-general of the Confederation of British Industry. NYT 01/25/11. In the wake of the Conservative/Lib-Dem budget cuts, the UK suffered a decline in GDP in the fourth quarter, after several rising quarters.

The UK made cuts very much like the ones Rep. Ryan proposed in his Republican response to Obama's State of the Union address. How do you stimulate an economy by cutting the government's budget? Market fundamentalists claim government spending crowds out private spending, so if you cut the government, corporate energy will be "unleashed."

This doesn't make much sense right now. In a boom, excess government spending will crowd out private investment. We are not in a boom. While corporations are realizing fair profits--from overseas sales--and the banks are pocketing huge returns, few are hiring, even when there is increasing demand for their products or services; they are demanding more of their current employees, instead--overtime usually, mandatory unless a union is involved, and at regular, not overtime wages unless a union contract requires otherwise.

That's why we still have over 9.5% unemployment officially; it's estimated to be as high as 19% when discouraged workers and involuntary part-time workers are counted.

At least Obama proposed only a modest freeze to government, and insisted that it should invest in clean energy, etc. He could have made a strong case for the government as employer of last resort to invest in workers, and in addressing our sliding housing crisis, but he didn't: maybe not "centrist" enough.

One of his signature issues is education, which is logical, when talking about the future, but if the US is going to "win" the future, Race to the Top won't do it. Our children are not successfully competing with the rest of the world, but if we are to "win," they have to, not on standardized tests, but in skills and creative thinking: penalizing teachers won't accomplish that. Encouraging good teaching and supporting teachers would have a better chance--in colleges, too.

Obama's proposals, however, won't "win the future." The US must face its decline, withdraw from empire, and focus on its long-term deficits, not only of government, but of infrastructure, education, skills and trade.

That won't happen as long as the elite hold on to the status quo that enriched them. What the US needs is a democratic uprising like the one in Tunisia.

Anarchy Right and Left

I read a right-wing paean for anarchy in a libertarian newsletter; it was mirrored by a left-wing article expressing disgust--at corporate anarchy!

The pro-anarchist rhapsodizes about how 'mates' helped each other in the Australian floods, volunteering by the thousands--and then the government comes in, hunts for looters, restores law and order, and worst of all, collects taxes: end of paradise, the renewal of theft.

The leftist describes how the corporations are running Washington, and do the same thing--siphon off the people's wealth--with government collusion, bought and paid for.

So, is it the government, or is it corporations?

Conservative anarchists assume that all taxation is theft. Government service, to them, is an oxymoron. Nothing government does has any economic value. They assume that everything should be provided by 'business.' So, private roads and military would be more efficient? Would every road be a toll road?

What anarchists ignore, are the 300 pound gorillas on the loose, all over the world--the global corporations. Wouldn't they mind if corporations ruled everyone's lives without any government oversight, or intervention? Wouldn't they mind the toxic pharmaceuticals, dangerous toys, dangerous roads, dangerous cars, and above all, dangerous banks?

Why do conservatives, more generally, think that less government, or no government is preferable? These aren't the days of Daniel Boone. Now, there are huge, powerful private institutions--as well as a lot of crooks--predators: human and institutional. Will corporations protect you from other corporations? Their only rationale is greater profit. Ultimately, government's motive (in a democracy) is to please enough voters so that its elected leaders get reelected.

The profit motive does make private enterprise efficient, but there are examples of better government-provided outcomes: health care and utilities abroad and in municipalities are only two. But there are many functions that only a government should do: maintain order, maintain means of transportation, i.e. roads, airports, city streets, public health, ensure that the marketplace is not a shark-pit and then, there's also defense. Should we fire the Pentagon and hire Blackwater/Xe?

That I would go for: dismantle the Pentagon, then don't renew Xe's contract. But seriously, there are a lot of issues that the left and right see in tantalizingly parallel ways.

Doesn't everyone get impatient with bureaucracy? But it's both government and corporate, isn't it. The major difference is that government legalese is usually of legible size.

What we're really facing here is the takeover of corporate gangsters, who buy the government, or enough of its members so that they can continue siphoning off Americans' wealth, regardless of the hardship. Raise taxes on the middle class and poor (Sales taxes, real estate taxes) and cut income taxes on the rich, and on the corporations, from which they derive their wealth. License corporations to do everything, and profit handsomely.

I present to you the Selfish Class, the title of a book you'll find on the referenced site.

Deficit-mongering Endangers Dollar

If you scream about the deficit, but then don't do anything about it, or pass tax cuts that increase it, you actually endanger the nation more than the deficit, itself. The Republicans are forcing this to happen. They are shortening the time before the world's nations will jettison the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency, because US fiscal policy will lose credibility even faster, while the nation will be mired in non-recovery. However, the dollar is likely to lose its special status, anyway, sooner more likely than later.

What matters is not the government deficit, but the trade deficit: the two are not necessarily related. Deficit spending that enhances US jobs, productivity and creativity would actually cut the trade deficit and delay a move away from the dollar. Deficit spending that simply increases our national debt, like the tax cut for the wealthy, will bring us closer to the time when the US Dollar becomes just another currency; it increases our trade deficit and makes the US poorer.

The dollar losing international reserve status will be a very big deal. It will be a disaster for the US, unless the way has been carefully prepared. What's the likelihood of that?

This is what will happen: the US can no longer so freely borrow on international markets: the Fed can't blithely create money as it is doing now with Quantitative Easing. The bigger problem would be: how do we repay (by far) the largest trade deficit in the world? We won't be able to just print dollars for payment. We'll have to earn Renminbi, or Marks or Rials to buy from those places.

Imports will cost much more. Three-dollar gas will be a faint memory: prices would be comparable to Europe's ($5-7 per gallon now), or much higher.

We also won't be able to continue our military mission to control every corner of the globe. That, to me, would be a positive outcome, both for the US and the world. Who would lend to us at the low interest our bonds now pay? Interest costs to maintain our military could bankrupt us, something that happened not only to the Romans, but also led to the overthrow of the Bourbons, ushering in the French Revolution.

Any dollar-denominated asset would be worth much less outside the US. Americans would have to produce more, at lower cost--through subsistence wages, perhaps, or greater efficiency, or probably both--and import less.

Perhaps, an increasingly impoverished majority would demand Equality, as rebelling masses did on the streets of Paris, but it might come too late. The billionaires may have decamped, with their tons of gold (not dollars), just like Tunisia's Ben Ali!

Loss of reserve status could end the American empire. While temporarily poorer, Americans could end up freer and better off--if they throw out the corporate octopus impoverishing us all.

Denigrating Reason

"We're building a grassroots movement to stand up to the special interests and stand up for middle class consumers," says Al Franken, in response to the FCC approval of the Comcast-NBC merger.

I wonder how that will happen. I have a local activist friend, a county legislator, who continuously tries to get people out for demonstrations, to hold signs, to protest--new Democratic Governor Cuomo's conservative economic policies, for example, when he gives the state of the State at a local college. I went to one or two demos, and was embarrassed by how few people there were. My friend even urged me to speak!

How do you mobilize people who work 10-hour days, and then go home to vege out in front of the TV, or on the computer? How do you mobilize people whose lives are isolated, who get most of their contact through TV, and who, moreover, are increasingly influenced by the corporate media?

People are discouraged from thinking in this USA. It's like Steve, my "Christian" fellow alum, whose reaction about anything is "those leftwing intellectuals…" About the economy: "intellectuals and economists" can say all they want, but "I know: debt is debt." When I expose him to a little Keynesian economics--deficits can be investments, if the money goes to enhance the economy--he dismisses all intellectuals--including me, of course. He knows; he's a self-made man (in California real estate).

His antagonism towards thinking parallels the vociferous right wing Commentariat--Palin, Beck, et al. And look how well the politics of ignorance and anger has done in the last election! People voted for Republicans not for what they stood for, apparently. Polls show high support for all the issues Republicans oppose, like health reform, and aid to the unemployed. People voted for Republicans simply because they weren't in power; they were angry. A man demanded of me, as Election Inspector, to produce a list of incumbents up for re-election (I wasn't allowed to give political information), so he could vote against them. Their party affiliation didn't matter; but his ignorance was staggering. He's the corporate elite's template for the perfect voter: ignorant and unthinking. I saw a Republican election observer take him outside; he told him who to vote for.

We have schools that "teach to the test," and universities increasingly funded by corporations to promote their interests. In public schools, thinking is discouraged in favor of rote learning and discipline. I taught in colleges, none of them prestigious. In all of them a student who could think, or who wanted to think was a precious gift. Ironically, there were more of them in my prison classes.

Inmates knew they were being screwed; everyone else just wanted a B.

Our denigration of reason parallels Rome's in the Empire's last centuries.

MLK Hangover

When is an anti-war activist for a war? In the case of Martin Luther King, Jr., apparently, it's 43 years after his death. Yes, the Pentagon celebrated Martin Luther King Day. The address by the Pentagon's Counsel, a friend and classmate of MLK's son, didn't entirely elide King's opposition to the Vietnam war--and war in general-- but Johnson certainly tried to sugarcoat it for those listening. American soldiers as Good Samaritans:

"Those in today’s volunteer Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road, and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people." (Jeh Johnson's Address to the Pentagon on MLK Day).

I would be the first to applaud the unusual military men and women who do "administer aid" in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but wanting "peace, freedom and a better place" in those war-torn countries is not the same as bringing peace. However, the military is brainwashed into thinking that it is.

American planes rain down destruction on both places, as do unpiloted drones in Pakistan and the border areas, Special Ops go out on night raids and kill people, some of whom are labeled "bad guys" after they are killed, while others are hauled off to hell-holes like Bagram, where they are mistreated and/or tortured. How does this bring "peace" and "freedom," how does this create a better place? Too often, innocents, including women and children are killed. Sometimes, Americans have even falsified the carnage afterwards to make it look as if the innocents were "insurgents," placing guns, or explosives paraphernalia near them to incriminate them after the fact.

So many observers have pointed out that every woman and child, every non-combatant killed, or detained in our notorious "black" prisons, creates dozens of supporters of the insurgency, even if many don't know what the insurgency is. Some go over to the other side even with their eyes wide open: they know the brutality of the Taliban, and its retrograde social policies, but they see the US/NATO as worse!

Their conclusion is justified, even if the Taliban are more intentionally brutal than US/NATO forces. It is the US/NATO presence that drives the war; its technology and money makes the destruction possible.

If MLK were alive now, he'd say 'let the Afghans choose their own way.' He'd also denounce the huge sums of money spent by the US on destruction (euphemistically labeled 'Defense.') He would point out, in his resonant voice, that all those hundreds of billions of dollars were snatched from the hands of babes, children, and our future, that if we spend on destruction, instead of education, we'll reap the whirlwind.

That's what the Romans did. They didn't even spend money on their famed roads, only on their 'volunteer' (mercenary) military. Look where that got them!

Serfdom Better than Wage Slavery

My son was not laid off last week, but a lot of people were. They came in to work and were told they no longer had a job: just like that. My son works for a firm that services Wall Street. Instead of growing by 40% in the next year, as its leaders had forecast, its business this year will not grow at all. So, they restructured.

But imagine: working for a firm for years, and then walking in one day and being told, "You don't work here anymore."

The only thing that may drive this small corporation to give at least several months' pay, and decent severances, is to protect its reputation on the Street.

My daughter helped unionize an office of Calpirg's subsidiary, The Fund, only to see this ostensibly progressive non-profit put roadblocks against negotiating a first contract, while management fired the shop members one by one--until finally my daughter lost her job; soon thereafter the division was closed and with it the union shop.

Corporations are people: remember? They can give unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns. They are so humane.

I also helped found a union, back in the days when unions weren't yet targeted for destruction. I played a small part of bringing a union to the University of Central Florida: the faculty voted 80% for. Why? Without a union, department chairs and college deans frequently overrode faculty recommendations, whether it was for hiring, promotion, or tenure. Our chair promoted his favorites.

The union didn't change much, but it was some insurance on job tenure and promotions.

Working in firms like my son's, people have no security. He's paid well, including a nice bonus ("not Wall-Street-size, Dad"), but he could walk in tomorrow, or next Friday, and not have a job!

Does the corporation care for the people who work for it? Even the CEO is expendable, although he's probably careful to have a golden parachute in his contract. But corporations are not people. They use people, and spit them out. If you're lucky, you may have a good job in a corporation for a long time. It used to be that you'd get a pension if you lasted until retirement, but now you and your employer jointly fund a 401K while you work there. If the market goes bust, as it did in 2007-8, then your retirement fund could go bust, too; the switch from pensions to contributory funds is accelerating, expressing employers' lack of concern for employees.

In the hundred years before Rome fell, all but the Senators were reduced to serfs. Employees with no security are more at risk than serfs or slaves, but that's the direction in which we're headed.

Heroism, Viciousness and Social Security

On the one hand, you have the heroism of people like Patricia Maisch in that Arizona crowd, and you have the deranged hatred of the killer, Loughner. And yet, on a scale of viciousness, I would rate Loughner less vicious than the people, both in Congress and in finance, who want to wipe out or weaken the only economic security deprived Americans can count on--Social Security.

Who has Maisch's kind of heroism in the realm of national politics? On the one side, we appear to have the mean and meaner, and on the other, we have people who might have good instincts, but so many are corrupted by politics.

Conservatives claim that the left hates the free enterprise system, hates business and is elitist. This is ironic, since even Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a Socialist, works to bring business to Vermont, and speaks like the New York working class Jew his family was. Democrats do the same: they want to get re-elected.

What the elected tribunes of business claim, is that no regulation is best for business, even when the lack of it led to the crack up of 2007-8, which was surely not good for business--except, ultimately, the big banks. But that's not enough. No, Republicans want to "partially" privatize Social Security, even after the stock-market crash that wiped out so many people's retirement portfolios, and private pension funds.

What is that about? The right-wing enthusiasm for going after Social Security is driven by several different, reinforcing motives. One is simply ideological: it's a government program; it's well-run and popular, thereby giving the lie to the claim that governments can't do anything.

It is not running out of money, either. Down the line, its financing should be tweaked, but a second motive animating the right is all that money: they want to get their hands on it, just like the bailout money, just like the commodities exchanges and currency markets, just like the money of the millions of us suckers, who dabble in the market. But Social Security money would be trillions, and so many more could be sucked dry, by high finance.

But I think there's another reason, one alluded to by Helen Thomas, the recently displaced star White House reporter. She concluded that we shouldn't give the newly empowered Republicans, "the ability to wipe out or even mitigate the only economic security deprived Americans can count on."

Think about that: the only economic security deprived Americans can count on--like a number of my friends. What the movement to privatize would also do, if successful, is render the elderly a new frontier to "invest" in--even down to our last dentures. And it would make us even more vulnerable than most of us are right now.

To the vicious, that's attractive, too: the Populus can then be managed, just as they were in Rome.

Why Dismantle the US?

It doesn't seem to make sense that Americans, many from old families living in this country for many generations, would want to dismantle the country that nurtured them.

In my Dec. 7th blog-post, "Come-on to Apocalypse," I showed how a libertarian/conservative list was promoting relocation to any of "80 beautiful countries." Allegiance to the US seems absent among the moneyed. Their attitude: take your fortune somewhere else, where you won't be so heavily taxed/regulated/controlled. The assumption is that the US is all of these things, although our tax burden is lower than almost all other developed nations. In many developing ones, however--and some developed ones like Greece--taxes and regulations are not enforced.

I expect the emigres would evade taxes of both their new abode and their former one, but it's ironic that the site promoting emigration also highlighted free medical care, something most conservatives complain about when it's "Obamacare."

So, the financiers, or other wealthy, have places to go. Their means of enrichment, however, might even suggest a parallel to fugitives from the law, who flee the country to escape imprisonment. For example, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, et al, get virtually free money from the Fed, which they use to speculate through computer programs and algorithms, doing split-second trades for billions of dollars, and profiting with fractions of a cent. Actually what they are doing is ripping off millions of dollars daily, from everyone else. How different are they than the cyber-criminals who siphon unnoticeable fractions of a cent from millions of transactions? There have been crime movies, in which super-criminals invade bank security networks and do the same thing.

But Goldman, et al aren't criminals, at least in the legal sense: they're Wall Street operators. Why do they want to dismantle the US? Because they can: they can come away fabulously wealthy, but at the expense of everyone else.

The same ethos rules many American businesses: military contractors who overbill, "frackers," who don't care if they ruin our drinking water, for-profit prisons gaining "clients" from corrupt judges and manufacturers who outsource to avoid taxes and union wages.

This isn't just economics, it's politics: the effect of trade treaties. Mexican or Chinese workers undercut American labor. Trade barriers were lowered or eliminated enabling corporations to break unions and force American workers to compete with the lowest-paid labor globally.

Again, why? There is strong anti-union feeling among those who earn from capital: after all, the more a worker gets, the less they get--and vice-versa. Additionally, workers without unions can't resist the boss.

It boils down to class struggle. Capital is winning, never mind if it's destroying the country. With their money, the wealthy can always go somewhere else: one of those "80 beautiful countries." They can even find new victims.

In Rome, Senators voted to hand Italy and the Emperor over to the Ostrogoths, rather than raise taxes on themselves.

How to Dismantle the US

It really hasn't taken that long, and it's nearly successful. The mouth-frothing "revolutionaries" think it's a return to True Principles--like slavery, a friend joked--but it isn't.

The counterrevolution began because of the moderate success of progressive politics in the late 1960's. The initiators? The extremely wealthy, who felt threatened by everything from civil rights to Medicare to that old perennial: taxes. They funded think tanks and talk radio that began to spread their ideology, supplemented later by Fox News: their views boil down to liberty for wealth and corporations, but liberties for ordinary people only to the extent they don't conflict with the interests of wealth-holders and corporations. In effect, they promote democracy for money, corporate "free" trade, and neglect or dictatorship for everyone else.

Ever notice that the Department of Education is a favorite target of frothers? Good public education promotes democracy, even in the workplace (!). It also creates a highly skilled workforce. This would be good, if you wanted a relatively egalitarian society. If you want greater class differences, managerial power, and profits for shareholders, with only a small minority able to get decent jobs, then you oppose school budgets until you destroy the public system--good people send their children to private schools (and have the money to pay for them).

The rest become surplus labor, like Marx's lumpen-proletariat, like the Roman mob getting "bread and circuses." That keeps wages down and destroys unions. "Free" trade does the rest.

Anyone earning wages (as opposed to capital gains), pays taxes to support the only parts of the Empire worth maintaining: prisons and the war machine.

What about the great consumption market that underlay American power? Now, corporations make their money in Asia, Latin America, even Europe: places where the middle class is emerging, or has been able to protect itself. In the US, dwindling numbers can afford middle-class consumption. Notice that US output has now recovered to pre-crash levels--yet with 10-19% unemployment, and few prospects for the unemployed. Corporations earn greater profits than ever, but mostly abroad.

Republicans block job programs, demand tax cuts for the wealthy, and try to de-fund all public programs but the military--and the police. You need the police, and fear of "Terror," to keep the restive masses in line. Fox, etc. promote the latter.

So, the Pentagon gets about $1.35 trillion, or about $4,000 per person. Other discretionary expenditures are nugatory in comparison. Social Security and Medicare ran surpluses from the payroll tax until this year, against which government borrowed, to reduce the deficit.

Meanwhile, other nations spend on green infrastructure, education and health: they surpass the US (14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics. Shanghai came in first). No wonder Google, etc. set up research centers in China!

Our military will be all that's left--until the world stops lending us money.