Drug testing and the poor

File it under... Take your pick, the relentless crushing of hopes and dreams, the continuing class war, canary in the coal mine, or a last, desperate measure by the deluded rich to keep the little people divided but Barbara Ehrenrich's recent column on the criminalization of poverty should be a real eye-opener. I'd dare all the cruel and mean-spirited people who answered yes on that poll circulating facebook on whether people getting "welfare" should be drug-tested to read it but why waste my time. Just one of those leftover battles from the Great Society and backlash that has persisted as the "culture war" but it is good to ask from time to time why so many Americans feel that hating the poor is so much fun.

Of course, the latest meme circulating in this regard goes like this: "Thank you Florida, Kentucky, and Missouri, which are the first states that will require drug testing when applying for welfare. Some people are crying and calling this unconstitutional. How is this unconstitutional? It's OK to drug test people who WORK for their money but not those who don't?… Re-post this if you'd like to see this done in all 50 states."

It took all of two seconds on google to discover that this was a hoax, or at least hasn't happened yet. A refutation and analysis can be found here. Well, it's not okay to drug test people applying for a job but for some reason people have accepting peeing in a cup as just another inconvenience they will put up with in order to rent themselves. The first thing that pops into my mind on this is, where do people flogging this dumb idea expect the money to come from for this? When I was in the army, we had to pee on command about once a month and sometimes more often. The hq quys told me that they could only afford to actually analyze one out of twenty samples at random and the test itself was ridiculously easy to beat. So what was actually accomplished I don't know, just to keep us scared I suppose. There is a difference between rhetoric and reality, maybe when the price tag comes out this symbolic victory of the welfare hordes will seem slightly more Pyrric than as a rhetorical club to beat them with.

This is my third attempt at writing this post and the updates keep coming. Apparently Florida did implement the drug tests, at a cost to the taxpayers of $178 million, and were only able to kick 2% of applicants off. Florida has one of these new gop governors that is a blatant dictator, suprize suprize, when it comes to passing laws that might help people like the health care reform it takes forever but government moves quite quickly when it is harming people at great expense. Whether this is accurate or not, who knows. Maybe it just illustrates how dysfunctional our government is, or who's interest it serves.

We all know the stereotypes of the poor and welfare, so it would be a waste of time to recount them. Noam Chomsky once speculated that if a ruling class wants to institute a dictatorship they need to create a dispised minority that the general public can really be made to fear and hate, then punish that minority to show how the dictatorship is able to protect you. The larger problem that stares our society in the face is that industrial capitalism, with it's ever-increasing pressure to push down labor costs and raise profits, creates a superfluous
population that contributes little to profits and post-crash this population is increasing. The situation is unique in American history, Kevin Phillips has written in several of his last few books that past hegemonic societies (Spain, the Netherlands, and England) in decline experience a similar phenomenon where capital goes abroad in search of greater returns, skilled labor at home atrophies, and inequality increases and calcifies.

Paul Krugman, in The Conscience of a Liberal, generalized that inequality before the New Deal was relatively constant, economic growth raised the income of workers though they never closed the gap. So, industrial workers faced great insecurity but generally their incomes rose. Since the mid-1980s however, the incomes of regular workers has actually declined adjusted for inflation and almost all growth has gone to the rich. This is a lot of assumptions but especially in light of the sustained campaign to yank away pensions, health benefits and so on from public-sector workers like teachers seems to provide evidence to the frustrations. Enter the right-wing noise machine that stokes fear of the other. This is a very good illustration of what Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about in Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study of Ethics and Politics (Library of Theological Ethics) many years ago, it is a thesis that requires a good deal of qualification but group identity tends to reinforce group interests and the selfishness of members toward outsiders.

If distilled to a single question, such as "why do so many working class Americans hate the poor?" this leaves out many group dynamics that serve to maintain not just the status quo but continual degradation of the majority of Americans. Looking down on lowere groups must give some comfort in their own declining status as big business sits on its trillions in offshore cash and small business creation stagnates because big banks find it more profitable to invest in speculation than productive enterprises. It is also really painful to look helplessly at the huge bonuses the elite pay themselves, so scolding the masses of welfare queens supposedly hoovering gobs of taxpayer's money is a way of averting one's eyes to real problems.

Anyway, these viral memes and talking points are dropped into the roiling mass of working class ferment like poo bombs by professional intellectual hucksters from places like the heritage foundation and american enterprise institute to prevent and distract from any kind of mass awakening. Maybe I have it all wrong but I sure wish the people who propagate this kind of meme could recognize that they are often one layoff, catastrophic illness or accident away from joining the poor they dispise. What happens when you're the one on the other side, trying to fanangle the bureaucratic nightmare to feed your family because it is the only way to avoid starving in the street?

Just food for thought as we trudge off to the daily grind.

Safe as Houses

Fallout from the housing bubble and bust has harmed a great number of people here and around the world, like a bursting appendix this speculative trainwreck will continue to ooze poison into the body politic for years if not decades. If you shout loud enough you can make the disaster anyone's fault you like, but blaming poor black people or misguided government policies ignores the speculative predation really at the heart of the collapse. Speculation is the practice of buying things simply to sell them later for a profit, most of the time these investments build value through bubbles and not real value. A certain amount of speculation can be productive in investment markets, but too much can be disasterous.

I've mentioned Matt Taibbi's Griftopia before, but it really is worth repeating. Yes, there were plenty of speculators buying houses with goofy interest-only mortgages and other batty-ass meatheads out there, but home ownership is one of those American traditions built up by the national storytelling and government policy. An awful lot of regular Americans were talked into buying or refinancing by slick con men who then deceived them with the details. Coincidentally, these were the majority of people tossed out onto the street by foreclosure as the government bailed out their banks. Why rescuing the idiot bankers directly when the government could have helped people stay in their homes and bailed out wall street's gambling at the same time is a question for another time. Now, containing the recommendations of very serious people for punishing those foolish enough to believe the propaganda of homeownership aspirations is, well, all that can be done.

Since batshit fascists have hijacked the national debate to "deficit reduction" instead of fixing the economy and all factors relevant to the average American and our limp-wristed president follows dopeily along, we can expect to see lots and lots of articles like this one. The authors are professors at NYU's Stern school of business so the rhetoric is couched in reasonable sounding language but the argument calls for fundamentally reshaping the American economy and thoroughly quashing one major aspect of Americans' expectations and aspirations. The latest sacrifice for the alter of "deficit reduction" is to take away mortgage interest deductions and any other "subsidies" that might help us. Use of that term is telling, it is a "subsidy" if public funds go to public purposes, bailouts of banks and other companies run into the ground by idiot executives, well that is something else. When your evidence that these policies don't help the purpose comes from that reliable bastion of objective research the american enterprise institute, warning flags should go up.

The article pays lip service to the substance of why these subsidies exist but does not name the banks that make out like bandits by enabling "people to borrow more than they could afford so they could buy houses bigger than they needed" but blame, as usual, both sides of the political aisle equally. Equally neglected is the bubble machine that enabled wildcat mortgage brokers and speculators to "make highly leveraged bets on real estate that turned sour and wiped out nearly $8 trillion in household net worth.' Taibbi locates the villain repeatedly blowing bubbles as alan greenspan, but he had a lot of help, mainly from wall street gamblers and their grifter par excellence goldman sachs.

Since the liberal position on ownership subsidies is that it helps reduce income equality, but empirical evidence suggests that the rich gain substantially more from them than the middle class, this justifies doing away with deductions and favorable interest rates from fannie and freddie altogether in the authors' eyes. They offer the fig leaf of extending assistance to renters, which would of course simply put more money into the pockets of landlords. Historically, landlords are pretty much the aggregate epitome of evil, some may be decent, but most simply exploit their tenents. America, with its wide open spaces was diluting the power of landlords, especially after the homestead act was passed and again after WWII when suburbs made modest houses attainable for the working class. Government was instrumental in empowering people to own their own houses and farms at the expense of landlords. Of course, without regulation this would simply transfer the exploitation from landlord to bank.

So, eliminating all these "subsidies" will, fix all that ails us, cut $700 billion in wasteful spending and wrench the dream of having your own castle from lots and lots of people. In their words, "reforming the American housing finance system will improve the budget and stimulate growth and will make a real contribution to our future prosperity." Supposedly steering investment from homes to "areas of the economy that offer higher rates of return, like human capital, infrastructure projects and capital business projects in other industries" will make everything better. Riiight. I guess if you crush people's expectations of meaningful work and getting ahead, while condemming them to tenements, that will unleash a flood of investments in productive capacity. Why not, it's worked so well in the past.

This article smells of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and really shows how much the intellectual "business school" side of academia has been retarded in the age of austerity and perpetual recession. Just like pitting workers against each other, sacrificing social insurance programs we've paid into our whole lives, cutting education committments at all levels in favor of imperial domination, and privatizing military functions at incredible expense to maintain that empire, elite opinion advocates nothing less than eating our seed corn and ensuring our continued decline. Houses stopped being safe with the bursting of the bubble, now our imperial citadel is sinking in the shifting sands of a devestated peasantry, all for the benefit of a tiny minority of the obscenely wealthy. That this kind of milquetoasty tyrannical prescription came from academics and not mouth-breathing teabaggers in the NYTimes and not fox news, gives a pretty good indication of what's in store for the future of our fading republic.

Defense preparedness

Does anyone remember george w bush accusing the Clinton/Gore administration of falling down on military preparedness during the debates? He claimed that several divisions of the army would have to report "not ready for duty" if called on by the commander in chief. It really showed the extent to which the end of the cold war and peace opened conservatives to make cheap partisan attacks in formerly sacrosanct areas of government. For example, during the reagan administration, despite the unprecedented peacetime defense spending spree the army depended on "roundout brigades" from the reserves and National Guard to fully equip several divisions. So, on the eve of Desert Storm several divisions of the ready deployment force sent to the gulf were fully one third understrength and the Marine Corps had to borrow modern M1A1 tanks from the army to equip its armored units. But president bush I didn't call reagan's patriotism into question, and secdef cheney even praised the former commander-in-chief for bequeathing such a powerful force to the new administration. How far the empire has fallen that the opposition now feels cheap political points can be scored by attacking incumbents on defense.

Not that he ever would have, but Gore could have used an example from a past transition to make bush's party look awful. Those divisions were not ready for duty according to a cold war Pentagon doctrine that required army units to fight a conventional war like that envisioned between the US and USSR across central Europe and immediately extricate itself and deploy to a brushfire type of conflict, the two war doctrine. To say nothing of the Clinton DoD developing the satellite-guided JDAM and unmanned drones that gave the military an integrated cyber capability to project power in a conventional and unconventional sense not true before. Of course, new technologies made this possible but like so many things that went right during the '90s the Clinton administration got credit for these advances mostly by staying out of the way.

The Eisenhower administration depended on a tripwire doctrine or "strategic monism" which held that aggression anywhere could be met with only one response, overwhelming nuclear annihilation. The only alternative was clandestine black ops by the CIA, which were used to overthrow disobedient regimes in Central America and Iran, but not appropriate for say, counterinsurgency campaigns. Putting aside the morality of overthrowing regimes that, while not communist, were not overly friendly to Washington, the US did face an existential threat during the cold war that required defending allies and interests overseas. Eisenhower as president was actually interested in the conservative idea of balanced budgets and as former supreme allied commander during an actual war, he also understood that war isn't fun and shouldn't be pursued for national aggrandizement or adventurism. So in a way, Eisenhower's stripping of military preparedness could be seen as a way to make war an all-or-nothing option to prevent interventions just for the heck of it. In other words, Eisenhower would have been a much better president than gwb or obama.

However, when the Kennedy administration came in Robert McNamara assumed the job of secdef and was aghast at the inadequacy of the armed forces to meet new forms of communist aggression and subversion. According to Arthur Schlesinger in A Thousand Days the special assistant to JFK the new administration inherited a military in which only three of ten army divisions were stationed in the US and only a portion of that ready to deploy, obsolete airlift capacity, and shortages of ammunition and other logistics. However, the 82nd Airborne had many times as many 105 mm cartridges (I have to assume for recoilless rifles, they didn't have any tanks) and heavy mortar shells, weird. Tactical air support from the air force, probably one of the decisive elements of victory in WWII and vital in Korea, was atrophied and what assets they had were obsolete as well. (pp. 306-19)

I'm not attacking the Eisenhower administration for this, and neither were the New Frontiersmen, it was simply their theoretical doctrine at the time. That didn't stop candidate Kennedy from rhetorical attacks about the "missile gap" with the Soviets however, and that was simply a prediction made by Eisenhower's own military intelligence and later shown to be fantasy. An interesting though experiment is to ask what might have happened were WWII or Korean levels of tactical firepower available to the conventional forces of the US. Eisenhower avoided committing American troops to Suez, Algeria, Indochina, Hungary, and Cuba; all hot spots during the 1950s that could have flared into larger conflicts had the US intervened. There were plenty of hotheads gunning for a fight with the communists during Eisenhower's presidency, simply eliminating the option of conventional intervention may have avoided World War III.

Kennedy's commitment to building these tactical forces and expanding asymmetric capabilities such as the special forces made it easier to send troops to Vietnam. Not inevitable of course, but having new toys around makes the temptation harder to resist. Maybe I am projecting contemporary attitudes onto history, an easily made fallacy, it is difficult to imagine a time when American power was used more responsibly than today. At least until LBJ was dragged into Vietnam by Goldwater, his own advisors, and military leaders after JFK put our foot in there. Schlesinger wrote those many years ago that it would have been difficult for JFK to send American troops in to rescue the Bay of Pigs operation because they just weren't available. This seems like a contradiction though because he repeatedly referenced demands that the administration "send in the Marines" to overthrow Castro.

In the end history doesn't give a hard and fast answer to whether preparing for war prevents war or encourages it. But politicians out of power can posture any way they please because they have no responsibility to actually use the power. Once in power, politicians hopefully can gain that responsibility but there is no guarentee.

Three yards and a cloud of dust

Except it was third down and four yards to go. I know sports analogies for politics and government are always problematic and only really reinforce the sports' fan mentality towards politics, but there it is. So, let the gloating by conservatives begin. You know, the ones who deplore "outside money" in races if they come from the "deep-pocketed" unions, but curiously do not see the mountains of corporate cash funding those incredibly deceitful commercials. Anyway, for all those non-Wisconsinites out there, we had an election yesterday. It was the endgame on whether the prissy little shit scott walker will have absolute power to wreck our state.

Checks and balances in government don't work very well when one ideologically radical and completely uniform faction occupies all levers of power. Recall exists because, well, candidates lie. Lying about what you want to do, and then doing pretty much the opposite after taking power tends to piss people off. And in those cases, citizens have the right in our state to challenge them. And for all the dumbasses out there who say "elections have consequences," think for a second how deeply obnoxious that is. Did you assholes sit home and pout when the dreaded "socialist" obama was spending all your grandkids money on bailing out all those "waterdrinkers" who bought too much house? No. But shameless double standards, lying, and abuse of power in service to the "job creators" is the name of the day.

Actual grassroots citizens gathered signatures to recall six republican members of the state senate. These "public servants" were too busy licking the boots of their corporate masters to see how much harm their blind loyalty to gov. walker's agenda of crushing education and meaningful work in our state was doing to the people they are supposed to represent. While two of our state's more obnoxious senators, joe leibham and glenn grothmann, escaped recall for the time being, it was a start to checking the radical right-wing sabotage these scum are inflicting on this former bastion of modernity and progress. The short version is that despite being ignored by the leader of our party and getting little outside help, Wisconsin Democrats did manage to force these recall challenges and win two of them, the same utterly corrupt county clerk who rigged the supreme court election in favor the gop came through for the forces of darkness and prevented the third victory needed to restore some checks and balances in state government.

I was suprized that the outright theft was necessary considering how much money was spent defending darling's seat by national right-wing bribery outfits. The hypocrisy is amazing, but once you shed any vestige of shame, also completely unsuprizing. A few years ago, right after obama's inauguration actually, a local fundamentalist just happened to discover a booklist on our library's website that she didn't happen to like. Her gang of merry censors then dragged us through almost a year's worth of mud, demanding all sorts of censorship and people being fired among other things. The thing that seemed to get her goat the most though, was that the American Library Association came to our library's aid to defend that silly constitutional right to read what you want. So of course she squawked about "outsiders" who don't share our "small-town values" in classic victim-speak. "The big, bad librarians are interfering with our right to force our narrow point-of-view on everyone." Anyway, the library board, composed completely of local residents, voted unanimously to deny her right to censor. So much time and energy wasted simply to keep things the way they were. The hypocrisy of this story of course, was all the while she was whining about the ALA, she was getting support from the Eagle Forum, a notorious censorship and anti-women's rights outfit. But, high priestess phillis schafley shared her "small-town values" so the double standard does not register.

Now, the story leading to these recall attempts is different but shares some outlines. I would be remiss if I did not mention the ultimate bad word "unions." Let's set aside for the moment that falling short after all this effort reveals once and for all, or should in any worldview tethered even slightly to reality, the impotence of organized labor in the face of organized money. We should also set aside what the function of industrial and trade unions in capitalist society and what they accomplished for workers, i.e. the majority of people in our society. In the political realm, unions function as advocates for working people, however imperfectly that strategy may be. It was not enough this time. Probably the last chance for democratic change after the imposition of poll taxes and all the other crap walker pushed down our throats kicks in next time. This state is owned part and parcel by the koch bros. probably forever now. I guess if you have an authoritarian personality that will appeal to you. Perhaps they will let you manage some small part as a feudal lord if you can generate enough profit on the backs of all us serfs for them.

All the protests were about last spring was the very conservative attempt to maintain the status quo. Police, firefighters, teachers, and all the others didn't think it was fair to balance millionaire tax breaks on their backs. But last night proved that organized money will go to any length to fight democracy, social justice, and civilization itself. And they will win.

Democracy is dead, the republic is finished. Welcome to the new dark ages. The last time it phased in slowly too. A steady erosion of human rights and dignity for the benefit of an elite few. When the next generation of historians look at the decline of the American Empire, probably by candlelight in a dilapidated library and hiding from death squads, they will wonder with awe how the financial elite were able to not buy off so many but really turn them into allies. I certainly wonder that now.

As usual, I would love to be proven wrong. I would happily eat my words if there was any hope.

The Tea Party Won

The Tea Party Won

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/opinion/credibility-chutzpah-and-debt.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

MoveOn.org furnished the first link and economist Paul Krugman the second. While it is true that the tea party, aka the far right republican base, pushed for the crisis and succeeded in getting some bad big gov't spending cut and a downgrade of the nation's credit rating in the process, very little good can come out of a simple partisan slogan like MoveOn's. Protesting stupidity is important but beyond that what's the point? Starting an internet campaign that doesn't cost much money is a good idea and I suppose making a statement that not all Americans are nuts at least shows some kind of genuine opposition. The White House certainly isn't opposing the loonies, or even trying to change the story.

Dr. Krugman went after the far right republican extremists for causing the instability in markets which will lead to far more cost by raising interest rates than cutting food inspections and pell grants will save. The obama administration may have lots of problems, but I doubt they would have started this without help from the bad cops. The NYTimes, as usual, went on record with the establishment prescription, here and here, but dealing with fanatics will require stronger measures. At least they pointed the finger at the right targets, it is the republican party in its entireity that is responsible for throwing 200 years of stability out the window. Past crises, like the Civil War for instance, were caused by extenuating circumstances but the mischief caused by republicans whenever a Democratic president is in office recently is as avoidable as it is predictable. The ideological underpinnings of conservative southerners secceding is worthy of being traced to today's dickmonkeys but I'll set it aside for now.

But, by also tying the guilt for crisis to S & P's lack of credibility; Bang! We finally get some traction to the real villains pulling the strings behind the political stage. Krugman draws attention to the crime that banks have perpetrated lately but is usually more interested in the shadow cast by wall street that is government. As an institution, wall street banks and investment houses cannot hope to stand up to the federal government, but picking off individual (and so fallibly human) politicians and turning them into allies looking out for wall street's interests has been an awfully successful strategy. Krugman has been right about a lot of things, he was talking about the collapse in employment during those wonderful, debt-fueled bush "boom" years when I lost two jobs and realized that good paying factory jobs were pretty much over. If he had been prescient enough to see how right wing attacks on teachers would be destroying my prospects for employment after all these years of college, maybe I would have started a small business of some sort. But businesses fail like crazy and well, at least no one can take away my degrees.

So, MoveOn's slogan is misleading if you look behind the scenes. The tea party doesn't really matter, they can yell and scream about whatever they like but politicians work for organized crime on wall street, not a bunch of naive and gullible old white people. Hypocrisy is rife in their astroturf "movement," for instance, if this debt deal leads to cruel slashing of Social Security and Medicare who will be hurt more? The minorities they target have already been decimated by past cuts, the "entitlements" they worry so much about going to black and hispanic people go disproportionately to retired white people. No matter, perception is far more important. If Taibbi's description of the financial mess is even partially true, it doesn't matter what the teabaggers do or say it is simply a way of big money to co-opt the righteous but undefined anger out there. I finished Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America and have to say that the subject matter really is cause for despair but he presents it in such a way that helps keep your chin up.

Obama has repeatedly proved that he works for wall street too, talking softly and carrying no stick when it comes to banksters, and actually appointing Goldman Sachs alumni to his treasury department. Giving in to tea party terrorism doesn't threaten wall street in the short term, that is why he was free to do it. But, what happens the next time speculators and goldman decide to crash the economy? Not that there is much it left but if the federal reserve, US treasury, and taxpayers are all tapped out after a decade of bailouts, tax-cutting, and wars will the next president be able to scrape enough billions together to bail them out again? How about the next bubble? The system is pretty much broken in addition to being broke, I have to wonder at this point what the GDP is for the bottom 98%. If there is any hope, it will have to come from an actual grassroots movement formed around ideas and not candidates.

Maybe the road back to that starts tomorrow with the recall elections for the Wisconsin State Senate.

Cycles afresh

I titled my last post cycles in american history and found since that Arthur Schlesinger had a book of the same name. I can't believe that slipped past me considering I'M WRITING MY MASTER'S THESIS ON HIM and it deals mostly with the subject I'm writing about. I'm quite ashamed but have added it to my 5 page single-spaced bibliography. Professors keep telling me not to continuously add sources and just write because I'll never cover everything, but this book fills a pretty vital area that was missing so I have to make an exception. Only about five hundred extra pages :( Oh well.

There are just a few random thoughts I wanted to share. Ever since Huffington Post was bought out or merged or whatever with AOL I have been taken off their mailing list so consequently I haven't read much over there. Last night I decided to take a look at what they were saying about the debt crisis. Pretty much what I expected but it seems more academics are posting their thoughts, just an impression. However, the commenters in most cases were even more adamant than at Salon that president obama got exactly what he wanted, in other words sold us all out. Yes, the gop fanatics are terrorists bent on wrecking the economy and government to destroy his presidency but he plays along. A line in Willy Wonka always sticks with me at times like this. "Wait, stop, don't." In as calm a voice as possible, the chocolateer urges one of the bad little children to stop their destructive behavior that is against his own rules.

In addition to reading things that are not good for my stress level I commented on a fb thread concerning economics. Most of the thread was pretty reality-based but one wingnut had to jump on and catch my ire. My friend asked who the super-rich people getting tax breaks were and offered the usual suspects, actors and sports heroes. Celebrities are the only super-rich people visible in mainstream america I guess. Perhaps this is why more americans identify with rich people than oppose them, hedge-fund managers, ceos, rentiers, and other shameless greed-heads have effectively erased themselves from public consciousness. When one girl derailed the thread by suggesting that anyone who doesn't give obama campaign contributions will be getting tax hikes I kind of lost my military bearing. But I pulled my punches and addressed everyone instead of just her by suggesting that people who haven't studied economics should really refrain from spouting talking-points and slogans that they adsorbed by osmosis from someone paid to structure them in the most obnoxious way possible. Coincidentally also in the way most divorced from reality possible as well.

And, in true woe-is-me style, got this response from her "So I should shut up, go to work, pay an @ss load in taxes, because nothing I say can make a difference? I don't need a $70000 education to tell me that is b.s." I guess I should feel sympathy for her, but I don't. Pity maybe, that kind of ignorance takes work. Or at least the ability to structure a pity party/guilt trip in an incredibly mean-spirited way. I don't know, was I supposed to apologize for someone's willful ignorance? Teach her something about macroeconomics? This was her prescription for, I guess a fair, tax system: "Staright percent for everyone no deductions and no return. Call it 17% of gross income for people and 30% for businesses." If you don't care enough to fix typos before making a completely unqualified pronouncement why should anyone listen to you? Especially when you would find some reason to be angry about it, were this enacted as policy.

I don't mean to pick on her, which is why I didn't name her, but this goes a long way to explain why we can't have an honest policy discussion. Working class people have every right to be angry, and it is not even suprizing that they cannot focus their anger on the source of harm. It is simplistic but needs to be restated often that the invisible rich have gamed the system for their benefit and your loss. Even people with no education should be able to understand that, but the invisible rich have gone to great lengths to conceal and misdirect the siphoning of productive labor and the wealth it generates upward to unproductive speculation. Yes, you, the worker, generates wealth. Yes, you, the consumer, produces jobs.

The debate over economics is a cycle in history that rhymes but the basics are always the same. Those who own or control great wealth against those who own or control little but their own labor. Marx may have been mistaken on the character of society after the revolution but in many ways his critique of capitalism really holds up after so many years. Technology changes, political regimes vary over time and place, and sometimes workers can shame or force capitalists to be a little less vicious towards their daily lives. Human nature however, does not change. Therefore, the same battles have to be fought every generation on some scale, complacency or lethargy and fear infects social classes, and other classes take advantage. Sometimes conflict results in revolution, other times in tyranny or reaction. Americans are pretty used to small changes, most working class people just can't accept when radical forces alter society in a major way.

Don't take my word for it, look these things up yourself. Once you start learning it is hard to stop. But if you are too lazy to question your assumptions and just get bitter and angry toward others, don't be suprized when you are ignored.

Cycles in American history

Mark Twain once said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. In American presidential history particularly this seems to have pertainence. There is a theory of a 36 year ideological cycle in the presidency, the last one ended in 2004 with the "reelection" of george w. bush. Of course, ideologies change with the passage of time, liberalism and conservatism in the Nineteenth Century were very different than today and the issues the parties debated bear only faint resemblance to today's issues. Given that there are 29 years of greed, graft, corruption, selfishness, pollution, speculation, war and all its attendent crimes, privatization, torture, and economic depression left in this cycle, I have little hope we will survive.

We can do a short review of these trancendent changes and years. In 1968, Nixon. Little needs to be said that hasn't been covered extensively by other writers. Looking back, we had a great economy, we were about to put a man on the moon, people were secure (once they got beyond draft age at least) and there was enough security that many could afford to experiment with new lifestyles and new business ideas. The protests and activism can be seen as healthy birthing pains of new freedom, equality, and awareness of a new generation that rebelled against injustice and war; or they can be seen as a spoiled group of kids that never had it so good and were flexing their selfishness muscles. The ideology of Nixon was mixed, whatever his personal feeling about things, the Vietnam war did end, detante with the communists was reached, landmark environmental laws were passed and enforced. Some, including myself, consider Richard Nixon's legacy a liberal one. He was a really complicated guy though, paranoia and resentment led to acts of great evil and malice that cannot be overlooked. Trying to pin the conservative hell of contemporary American politics is problematic and to some degree is a deterministic Sonderweg. Nixon did not inevitably lead to bush II, the teabaggers or business totalitarianism.

Further back in 1932, FDR was handed a massive catastrophe and reassured us, "the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself" still has a great ring to it today. An entire generation of bright young people were convinced by Roosevelt that public service was the highest calling, the material rewards were meagre but there was security and satisfaction in running a modern country well. The ad hoc institutions built during the New Deal were good enough to save the country from collapse, and provided the framework for winning WWII. This was no small achievement, especially considering how little corruption there was in the federal government, and trust that somebody was looking out for the little guy. There is so much more to say about this era, but I am trying to make this brief review and most people are aware of the changes for good during this cycle. It is not a stretch to say that FDR and the people inspired by him made possible America's superpower status.

Unfortunately, not all the cycles are paradigm changing, 1896 was one of those. A failed rebellion against business rule that lead to progress in gradual steps and reaction to crush idealism characterized this era. The cycles are kind of messy and Teddy Roosevelt epitomized the schiztophrenia of an emerging great power experiencing growing pains. Imperialism and eugenics mixed with internationalist idealism and cosmopolitanism, but America would have been a very different nation with William Jennings Bryan at the helm and the people he would have inspired.

Personally, I felt the "reelection" of shrub was a fluke. Special circumstances that screwed up the nice 36 year cycle. Seriously, so many people rejected the republican program of eternal war and there were so many stories of how rigged the election was, on top of the sub 50% approval rating he had that it had to be a mistake right? Then, Democrats finally took back Congress and so many engaged in the campaign around Barack Obama that things were a'changing. I had a feeling in the back of my mind that movement conservatives would not back down in the face of public revulsion, and one of "those people" in the White House would drive so many rednecks berserk. The crap sandwich that has gone down since Obama took office really has surpassed my most gloomy nightmares though.

In retrospect, a coat rack could have won in 2008 if there was a D by its ballot line. I think a coat rack would have more backbone and fight than the D that actually took office. In the 1930s the majority of business was shamed, and those that weren't were fought. The legitimate sovereign government imposed the regulation, progressive taxation, and empowerment of labor on business that gave us the great postwar boom, most of businessmen acquiesed. The few who continued to oppose the New Deal did so behind the scenes, as reported by Kim Phillips-Fein in Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. Their success in changing the terms of debate and making businessmen the victim explains a great deal of why working class people who should know better joined the tea party. This is why business doubled down after this latest collapse instead of showing appropriate shame for causing it.

We'll probably never know the real answers, all historians can really do is look at the facts and speculate on why things are the way they are. Is Obama really a Manchurian candidate, giving the birther nuts and their birth certificate mania a kind of inverse reality? In any event, he is not the leader we need right now, however choosing between a loser and a maniac like the republicans are likely to put up means we most likely will have to hold our noses for him. What if the boogieman shows back up? By this I mean diebold, people seem to have forgotten about that bs, even in WI where we watched a supreme court election get snatched away. That would explain the midterms, I know the only damn signs we saw were for lunatic teabaggers and corporate shills but did all the people who so enthusiastically supported BO really stay home? Or did diebold just make it look that way so we could have this great theater of the absurd? I mean I grumbled about how disappointing BO was, but I still went out and voted.

So, exceptions do exist in the cycle and can go either way. Twenty nine years is a long time.

The experiment has failed

When historians look back on August 1, 2011 I am almost certain that they will conclude that that was the day the American Republic finally and irrevocably ended. Just as the Western Roman Empire limped along for a few decades after Honorius did nothing to stop the Goths from sacking the city of Rome, we probably will have to endure a vicious period of decline, contraction, and massive harm to the population. While some historians called it the most orderly and peaceful sack in history, the trend was clear, the imperial government was impotent and incapable of protecting the public despite incredible tax burdens and expenditure on the military. Obviously predicting the future is a dangerous game, but it is possible to speculate on possible future scenarios based on recent decisions. In Corruption and the Decline of Rome Ramsey MacMullen traced the decay of public spirit and privatization of public power into the hands of magnates and military leaders which he contended drove the loss of security in the empire and eventual collapse due to barbarian invasion. This is the closest historical parallel to what has happened to the United States that I have been able to find. The civic order in our country has been demolished for the private gain of very few. Public morality has been reduced to a complete atomization of society in which popularly elected leaders sell out the commonwealth for campaign contributions and maybe a cushy private job after being tossed out for their treachery.

A routine and until now completely procedural vote to raise the nation's credit limit was hijacked by a faction that is completely willing to see the nation collapse despite a major component of that faction having a major stake in the financial stability of the nation. Strange isn't it? This situation seems so surreal, not only did the ruling faction capitulate completely in this crazy game, but simultaneously bought into and sold out reality. Empirical facts said that our economy is depressed in whole by lack of demand due to many factors above my pay grade to really understand or comment on, the proven remedy is to structurally address the lack of demand and incredible financial stratification of our society through government intervention, but our well-educated president has chosen to believe a fantasy explanation or simply doesn't care. Government spending to generate demand as a last resort has always pulled us out of recession before, and cutting back during recovery always leads to stalling. I suspect it is the latter in the president's thinking, through the same empirical process that has seen him capitulate and surrender to the opposition in every case. An opposition so bent and determined to see him, and by extension the country, "fail" that they have openly expressed this fact on numerous occasions.

At some point, and many commenters on say, Salon.com have reached that point long ago, those of us who were so excited to vote for Barack Obama have to make a decision on whether he really is this bad at politics or really believes in the completely bankrupt and self-serving ideology of the republican party. I knew something was up from the moment he gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention when he couldn't bring himself to spell out how the crisis in America was caused in its entireity by conscious conservative policies and the bubble mindset of speculative, shameless greeed. This tendency only accelerated from that point, the desire to be polite and conciliatory to the enemies of the American Dream. What happened? Was this simply the greatest bait and switch operation in the republic's history? Did this man who's entire life story had been the opposite of his predecessor somewhere along the line internalize the same selfish philosophy?

After the huge electoral landslide in 2008 the press was flooded with stories about the death of conservatism and the republican party. Maybe feeling sorry for the loser and underdog can account for a tiny bit of the conciliatory mood in the Democratic party in the first days, but every setback of what real liberals wanted chipped away at any plausible explanation. It wasn't just pie in the sky wishing, all guys like me wanted was a return to the days when the US didn't unilaterally invade countries for no cause, didn't torture or shred the constitution at any opportunity, didn't cut taxes in wartime, didn't privatize and deregulate the public sector or wage war on collective bargaining. At the very least we thought Barack Obama and historic Democratic majorities in Congress could fix some of the grosser iniquities in America, like hedge fund loopholes, oil subsidies or the incredible inefficiency and downright cruelty in health insurance. No, no, and no. It was being told to shut up for the "good of the country" while they snatched defeat from nearly inevitable victory.

A republic is only possible when the public is engaged and recognizes the stake it has. When power has been so stripped from the sovereignty and accrued in private hands they way it has now, popular government becomes a farce. When the loyal opposition becomes so shamelessly evil and bent on destroying society to undermine its clueless opponents, responsibility goes out the window. Even if somehow the US could be saved, what would be left after this civil war is over? There is a good reason for maintaining a public policy of not negotiating with terrorists.

I am still in the middle of what I am sure will be a volume of required reading for future historians looking at how the US went from the most powerful country on Earth to basket case in a generation; Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi. He swears a lot and has the gumption to call dispicable banksters for what they are and even makes pop culture metaphors in analyzing the hollowing out of our society, but puts his finger on the vast and interconnected network of mafia-like grifters who cracked open the American economy and ran off with the loot. Anyway, Ben Franklin's warning about having a republic, if you can keep it, is more applicable than ever.