Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Meaningless rambling

This is an old post from another blog that I would like to delete but want to save some of the content. Bear with me :) I do not want to edit it too much because I like to remember how my understanding of history and the world evolve over time. I think I was trying to review Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips, which has influenced a lot of my thinking lately.

Now I am (almost) an historian, so I am more comfortable looking back instead of forward. But I also do think a lot about what is in store for the United States in the near future, so looking ahead to what would probably be my golden years I can make a few conjectures.

Yin and Yang, trying not to be too pessimisitic yet holding back from unbridled optimism, there are several possibilities for the US and the world. A short examination of world powers throughout history gives us both Rome, which lasted for centuries and that culture really didn't entirely vanish until the fall of Constantinople in 1453; and Nazi Germany, which only lasted a dozen years, with most empires/great powers falling somewhere in between with varying amounts of impact.

I'm a big fan of Kevin Phillips' work, lately his study has concentrated on historical parallels comparing the US with 16th Century Spain, 18th Century Holland and 19th Century Britain; finding several similarities. Each mastered a means of power, Spain had New World bullion, Holland had wind and wave power and Britain had coal; each employed this power source to rise to the top of its world as the US has with oil. Each society matured with productive middle classes trading, manufacturing and transporting goods all over and flexing military might around the world. Also, each of these lost this productive middle and degenerated into a society stratified into idle rich and impoverished poor, having exported that which made them powerful. Means of production atrophied, leaving the masses without any employment while the elite invested their ancestors capital abroad in search of greater returns.

Leaving aside partisan interpretations, this is exactly what has happened in the US, a vast exhalation of meaningful production and stratification of wealth. The middle class of America teeters on the edge of collapse under mountains of debt and the insecurity of jobs. We no longer really make anything that the world wants and import a huge amount of our daily neccessities. In previous hegemons, however, it was the government and aristocracy that short-sightedly ran things awry and in the US it is a corporate culture that sees only individual, short-term gains for each firm; no one is really looking out for what the country as a whole needs.

I often liken the calcification of American society that accelerated under the Reagan administration and proceeds apace to Emperor Diocletian in late-stage Rome, who introduced draconian reforms to preserve the Empire. Security for freedom, only what the Reaganites did was dismantle the New Deal system of regulating the society as a whole and entrenched the elite, enabling the rot of previous hegemons to become the norm. The US really reached its zenith in the early 1960s and was slowly declining before that, so when Reagan announced "morning in America" it was an attempt akin to Diocletian to preserve a spot for the idle rich.

The obstructionism seen lately is nothing new, in short order. The Hartford Convention in 1815 was the last gasp of the aristocratic Federalists to preserve their place in Jeffersonian America. The Civil War was precipitated by an elite of southern planters who, sensing that they could no longer control the national government to their liking, tried to leave. Yes, it really was more complicated than just slavery and that is a whole different subject but that is for another time. New masters emerged from the ashes of that war, robber barons we usually called them, and they ran the country through giant trusts like Standard Oil until fucking up bigtime and bringing on the Great Depression, another long story for another time. However, the collapse of unregulated capitalism and stratification of the still young country was resurrected by the New Deal, republicans then as now did everything in their power to stop a reassertion of National power through the people's representatives.

Fast forward to the new century, vast tracts of the US are like a devestated peasant society. Or more accurately, like Sub-Roman Britain, the half century after imperial retreat from that island where the natives tried desperately to cling to Roman culture but succumbed to barbarians and their own decay. It is a national catastrophe when plants close, low-paying service jobs replace them if anything and slowly through medical emergencies and other disasters, our towns decay. If you take my hometown, it is interesting to see that there are gleaming new stores everywhere but most houses are falling apart. Not from neglect but debts incurred elsewhere that leave nothing left to counteract entropy. I imagine this is happening all over since in places where population is moving to, like California and the south, home prices were going way up, meaning that young people already saddled with student loans and credit cards have nothing left to improve their situations either.

Dang, praddled on again. Look for part 2 soon, where I might actually get to what I really wanted to talk about.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Illegal aliens and the gestapo in AZ (late posting, never got back to this draft)

My wife and I went to Arizona on our honeymoon and went all over the state, Phoenix, Sedona, and the Grand Canyon along with many points in between, I am at a loss as to where the problem actually is. Obviously undocumented migrant workers in this country from Mexico and Latin America is a big issue, we hear about it practically everyday from the rightwing noise machine. I'm pretty tired of hearing the same tired meme, "they steal jobs, they suck up welfare, they don't pay taxes, they cause crime, they bring horrible diseases in to the US," and of course drugs and terrorists, that old chestnut. No evidence needed, in fact, no amount of counterevidence makes a dent in this frame. So we have the white-supremacists camping out on the border with guns and beers, playing militia. And all solutions point to "kick them out, what part of 'illegal' don't you understand?"

I'm writing this because I'm tired of the non-debate I was having on facebook, as in, I posted this:

"America’s diversity is our strength. Our immigration system is broken, but we can’t undermine fundamental principles that define us as a nation in order to fix it. We have to stay true to who we are—a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants."--President Obama

And got back this:

"And my rebutall would be quite simply: Mr. President, if we are a nation of laws... THEN ENFORCE THE LAWS PLEASE! Enforce the laws or change they if you feel they are wrong, but the fedeal approach of "Yeah, thats a problem... wow, it's getting worse... meh, you wanna get lunch?" Sure isn't working for the border states.


I've got no problem with... See More immigration. It's a big country, we got room for alot of ya, but we'd like to know you're here and paying your fair share! It's like my house. I have no problem with people hanging out, but let me know you're coming over!

You want to debate that the legal immigration process needs reform, frankly that's not even a debate anymore. EVERYONE agrees that system is broken (and has been for decades!) so why has nothing been done?

At a very minimum, even if the law doesn't stand up in court, Arizona has forced the government to deal with a problem it either didn't want to or wasn't capible of dealing with.

Take a listen to that podcast I posted yesterday. Carolla is politically an outspoken centrist/political agnostic, and I agree with him that it breaks down as a common sense deal."
 
At least it wasn't a bunch of racist crap. The system is broken because the employers of these migrants want it broken, the same agribusiness conglomerates responsible for driving them off their land in the first place now employ them here for wages Americans don't find appealing. The reason new laws aren't put in place is the same power struggle that we just saw take a year and a half to (barely) pass a half-assed health insurance reform law. It is a win-win for conservative elites, they get a slave labor force, a surefire way to fire up the base, and wonderful excuses to put repressive police state measures in place such as in AZ.
 
There's no way to persuade the angry working class Americans of anything different. Having recently finished The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right by David Neiwert, I am starting to get a little scared for even the incredibly flawed democracy we have.

If I won the lottery...

I would love to open a (maybe the first?) organic, sustainable, green-power pizzaria. If money was no object I could buy a little hobby farm and grow my own supplies, greenhouse tomatoes and herbs yum. How hard can it be? I worked in a pizzaria for a few weeks, didn't seem all that complicated. You need a big oven, probably larger than this one Fusion 508FC 12" Single Deck Countertop Deluxe Pizza and Snack Oven even though it is kinda cute. But again, money not being a concern it would be about doing one thing I enjoy, cooking, and trying something new, gardening or farming. I can see it now, a few acres of wheat and an old-school windmill to grind it into flour, greenhouses for all the veggies so I can have fresh produce year-round. Maybe I could expand it to raise some dairy cows and pigs, then the supply chain would be practically self-contained :) Then, put up solar panels and windmills, heck I found this one on Amazon pretty cheap Windmax HY1000-5 1,000 Watt Max 24-Volt 5-Blade Residential Wind Generator Kit and even this Sunforce 39126 246-Watt High-Efficiency Polycrystalline Solar Power Kit 

Then what. Hmm, I know I love to make pizza and so far haven't been able to for anyone other than my lovely wife. The place I worked at got almost all of their ingredients from Sysco, a food-service outfit, and it isn't that their stuff was bad, I'd just like to get somewhere between that and Carl Sagan's idea of making food from scratch lol. It would be pretty satisfying I think to make my own dough and sauce. This is the biggest mixer I could find on Amazon and I'd probably need something considerably larger Hamilton Beach CPM700 Commercial Stand Mixer, Silver not that any of this silly idea would be the least bit economical. It would really be more of an ego thing. If I really got serious I would probably need to look into a biogas digester as well, recycle my garbage to fire the oven. Yeah, that's the ticket.