Success

Andrew Sullivan tosses out a typical conservative canard:

Why are so many on the left incapable of acknowledging that many people who are rich - but, of course by no means all of them - earned it the hard way? Until more liberals internalize this, they will fail to persuade America of the occasional need for government because people will rightly suspect that what they are really about is penalizing or diminishing hard work.

Why are so many on the right incapable of acknowledging that "success" and wealth are two entirely different things? Or recognizing the effect of too much wealth in too few hands on any society? I've spoken before about my desire to return us to Eisenhower taxation levels as a punishment to greedy bastards but not because I want to punish "success" but because the people who got the kinds of money I'm talking about did so by and large by criminal behavior and because they use that money to give themselves more influence in the government than they need or deserve, and make everyone else's lives miserable.

Sarah Palin, for example, doesn't give a rat's ass about America, but she loves those American dollars and she's going to run for President simply because it's become the easiest way for her to jump her way into the 8-figure racket. She doesn't even want to win, she just wants to run. But in the meantime she's making life harder for millions of Americans and making the world a more dangerous place. Is that the kind of "success we should admire?

And by the way, don't sit there and tell me that conservatives honor hard work. They disparage hard work all the time. Go to any McDonald's during a rush and tell me these people don't work hard. Yet conservatives laugh at them and do everything they can to build a world where people like that have to work harder, for longer hours, and for less pay so that a few people at the top can make exorbitant amounts of money and claim they "earned" it and whine and cry about every penny of tax they pay. Then ask yourself who are the ones being punished when there's not enough money even to keep the roads and bridges in repair.

Raise Sarah Palin's taxes, lower the taxes and raise the salaries of the McDonald's workers, and use the money in part to help people start their own businesses. You'll get more "success" out of that policy in terms of personal happiness than you will coddling the criminals of the upper classes.

Sully is correct, though, about American attitudes in one regard: Despite our freedom-loving rhetoric, Americans have a definite royalist steak in them still: that's why we admire useless slugs like Trump, laughing when he "fires" people, and why we denigrate professional athletes despite the fact that they do what they do in full view of everyone, both on the court and off it (this isn't a new thing: I wasn't old enough to witness it myself, but I know the story of how DiMaggio was booed for a contract holdout in the fifties). We complain about these players making millions but the truth is they work in a sport that makes billions, and the reason they get as much as they do is because they stand up for themselves. But the royalists among the working poor hate the idea of organizing for their own benefit (and athletes are working people regardless of how much they make) while championing the wealthy few who can afford to pay those salaries for organizing for their benefit. Those people are morons, but, being the dirty liberal I am, I would prefer them being happy, prosperous morons.

I like the fact that Sullivan tries to be reasonable and doesn't accuse people who disagree with him of being un-American Satan-worshipers looking to eat our children, but he still clings to conservatism which means that on any major issue, he is still wrong.

A Better World

David Roberts writes:

Americans know exactly what it means to vote Republican: lower taxes, strong national defense, family values. Those stories have been told so often that they no longer need to be told at all. They've become ambient, background landscape upon which foreground battles play out. Contrary evidence, of which there is a constant stream, doesn't fit the frame and is discarded. The brand has been cemented.

Of course conservatives (and whatever they were a century ago, Republicans represent conservatives now) have to spend tons of money to spread that message, and to mostly lie about it. Lower taxes for whom? Strong national defense against what? Family values where? Just to elaborate on Mr. Roberts last sentence, let's take a look:

Lower Taxes
The tax cuts always benefit the wealthiest and corporations: I remember challenging a Bush voter to hold on to a pay stub from November 2000 and compare it to a pay stub in 2004 and see if they were paying more or less taxes under Bush than they were four years earlier. Now I don't have my forms with me (the taxes for those years are in storage) but I remember looking at them at the time and I was paying more or less the same amount. As I'm sure were most other people making less than $250,000 a year. But propaganda being more important than actual facts, Mr. Bush got re-elected, most likely because of propaganda about:

Strong National Defense
9/11 was the best thing that could have happened to GW Bush. While there are those who claim his administration was complicit in the attacks, my personal belief is that they were so focused on figuring out ways to fill their pockets with taxpayer money, they didn't give a damn about terrorism until it smacked them in the face, and then they used it as an excuse to fill their pockets with taxpayer money. Who else but the Republicans and their pals in corporations like Halliburton profited from the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? Not working class Americans, who will be paying for these wars for generations both directly and indirectly. Not American soldiers, who continue to risk their lives in hostile territory (and not to defend those soldiers who themselves have committed war crimes) because pulling them out would make us look "weak". Certainly not the people of Iraq or Afghanistan, who we supposedly were there to "free". Being wrong even over such important things as death and war (and war crimes) is no deterrent to the power of propaganda when that propaganda appeals to our basest instincts.

Family Values
While the meaning of this has always been kind of vague, I've taken it to assume a kind of generic, "Father Knows Best" mythology with the father being the main breadwinner, the mother in her place as cook and maid, with obedient children, no one mean or impolite, quiet suburban neighborhoods, etc. etc. I could throw in being a generic white, Christian kind of thing but then I'd be accused of reverse racism or something. I suppose such a world wouldn't be so bad if you ignore the inherent misogyny and racism implied (though it would be boring as hell) if they actually practiced what they preached, which of course they never do. And also, since Republican economic policies tend to favor the very wealthy over working class Americans, that scenario is less likely anyway, unless you're one of those people who decries socialism while working making good money in a taxpayer-funded defense industry. And even under those conditions, we see lots of adultery, children born out of wedlock, homosexuality, all the things they claim to be against. But no matter. A "Family Values" voter will vote for a Republican because the propaganda makes it clear that the Republican is one of them regardless of what they actually do.

Now us liberals, progressives, whatever you want to call us, we, as Dave pointed out, have our own problems in the sense that too many of us see progress as progress over our own pet issues as opposed to looking at the bigger picture. A Democratic President might bend over backwards to gain rights for homosexuals but will be lambasted if he or she doesn't pull all the troops out of Iraq and/or Afghanistan yesterday. A President can make a complete withdrawal of all the troops but get attacked by environmentalists because we haven't stopped all pollution and renounced gas forever. And so on. We demand constant and immediate progress on all these issues and if we don't get it, we threaten to stay home. Which of course many of us do anyway: that is, stay home and do nothing but complain or worse, go out and engage in political theater rather than doing something substantial to make people's lives better.

Face it, our politicians will always let us down, what we need to remember is that we are the change that's required. And when FDR and the New Dealers came into power in 1932, that's exactly what we did. And even if we're not as good at it as we were then, the reality is that the world is a better place because of all that work. All we've forgotten is that you have to keep it up constantly because the greedy bastards never go away and some people will always be suckered into voting against their own interests.

So, to answer David's question, What do Americans get when they vote for a Democrat? Since 1932, we get a better world. And maybe those three words are all that we need.

A Better World.

A Quick Question

I get my medical care through the Veteran's Administration, which is funded via taxes, which means that everyone pays into it whether they are eligible for benefits or not. It is, by every definition, socialized medicine.

Now, there are those who say that I have "earned" it or that I "deserve" it because I served in the military, even though I thought I was a pretty poor excuse for an airman (and you'd have to ask those who worked with me whether they would agree with that assessment or not).

But my point is this: You can either sit there and try to determine who does and does not deserve the same kind of benefits I am currently getting, which would be a long and complicated process at best, or;

You can say that no one deserves to be covered in this fashion and try to take my benefits away from me, and all veterans (and others covered by similar programs at the state and federal levels on the grounds that it's taxpayer money), or;

You can try to make it so that everyone gets the same kind of benefits I do.

Which would you prefer?

UnCommon Ground

You can ask a hundred libertarians what libertarianism is and get a hundred different answers. I've spoken with many libertarians on this issue, in some cases at great length, but so far there have only been two common beliefs that I've been able to ascertain: 1) No Taxes! and 2) Fuck You!. No wonder then that the only people who take the philosophy seriously are people who require constant reinforcement via FOX News and talk radio. Even so, not many people take the Libertarian Party seriously: how can they, when you have a political organization whose philosophy is anathema to any kind of political organization? And where would the Tea Party be without the financial backing of a few individuals and corporations? Even with all that, they're still pretty disorganized. The amount of time, energy, deceit and propaganda that has to be spent by these individuals and corporations to keep this up is astounding, which of course goes to show how bankrupt the entire philosophy (both libertarianism and conservatism) is.

But I digress.

I can, however, envision two circumstances under which a libertarian society can exist. The first is in a completely agrarian society where every family is self-sufficient: growing their own food with their own supply of fresh water, maintaining their own infrastructure on property that they defend, raising their children to continue. I say agrarian because that's about the highest level of technology available to any society where cooperation takes place grudgingly and only for profit motive. It may be free, but it's certainly not very fun.

The second is a society that exists within an already established society where the infrastructure is already there. The old Confederacy is my favorite example of that.

You need three kinds of infrastructure for any society to survive: Physical, Political, and Philosophical. The need for a physical infrastructure is pretty clear: you can't even have a free market without roads and bridges. These have to be built and maintained. Can this be done by the private sector? I don't know any examples in the entire history of human civilization where it has.

A political infrastructure is necessary to mediate disputes and to prevent anarchy, and that too requires maintenance. There have been instances in this country where this has been provided by the private sector, none of them any good ("I sold my soul to the company store").

A philosophical infrastructure is necessary so that at least when we have differences, we understand and respect the rules by which those differences are hashed out. This can only be done by a continual process of education so that everyone, from childhood on, is taught what those rules are, what is and what is not acceptable behavior, and where everyone is given the skills they need to survive within the society. How these things can be accomplished within a libertarian society remains to be seen.

Now, all of this should be pretty obvious to anyone who is looking at our present situation from an objective point of view. It doesn't even require a lot of education: I mean, let's face it, I'm just a high school graduate, hardly what you would call a member of elite society. And I'm the son of a man who didn't even get that far, a man who was a common laborer who worked for the city of New York maintaining roads and bridges: that is, filling potholes. I grew up in a world where even someone like my father could raise a family of five and even save enough to buy a house and move to Florida. That world, that America, no longer exists. The only people now who can live even the kind of life my father did (and we were hardly what you would call rich: lower middle class at best) are those with either a professional skill, or the ability to sucker people out of their money.

And I think the problem with libertarians is that they've been privileged in so many different ways by a society built ostensibly by liberals that they take it for granted. If you think things are bad now, imagine how they would be if the New Deal had never been: imagine what would be happening without food stamps or unemployment benefits, without Medicare or Social Security, without welfare. Actually, you don't have to imagine it, you don't even have to rely on history books to tell you about it, you can see it today in the faces of the homeless and the ones we've decided we don't care about any more.

It's my observation that libertarians no longer recognize the liberal foundation that's allowed them to become successful, that they spend an inordinate amount of time concerning themselves with who deserves what in our society and how much they have to pay for it; decrying the corruption of politicians while simultaneously admiring the greed of the private sector, and working to elect people to office who want to tear down the political and philosophical infrastructure that maintains us as a nation in favor of those individuals and corporations, the end result of which (as we have seen) is more and more money in the hands of fewer and fewer people, making the world stink for everyone else.

I don't have to be very smart to see all of that. And I don't have to be very smart to see that there is very little common ground between liberals and libertarians. Because liberalism is less an ideology than a goal of shared prosperity and a recognition that for us to achieve a better world we have to work together, and in order for libertarians to reach out to and find common ground with liberals, they must reject their core philosophies: that is, cease to become libertarians. And that's the real bottom line.

Dear Conor Friedersdorf

Sitting in for Andrew Sullivan, Conor Friedersdorf has a question for Republican voters:

What I'd like you to do is to reflect upon the sudden controversy over the construction of a mosque and community center near Ground Zero. Forget about the merits of the issue. Is it good for your agenda that this is suddenly the most controversial matter in America? Doesn't it worry you when the public conversation shifts into culture war territory, where right-of-center politicians can garner votes and support without having to address the issues you ostensibly care about most? A campaign about the bank bailouts, health care reform, and deficit reduction might be more difficult to win, but victory would give the GOP a mandate to reverse the worst excesses of the Obama domestic agenda.

Let's be clear: at the time this article was written, the President has still only been in office for less than two years. The "worst excesses" he talks about are probably the passing of the health care bill, a lukewarm effort, at best, to curb the excesses of medical profiteering. Anyone who has found their insurance premiums doubled or tripled, or had their insurance canceled for spurious reasons, should naturally support a government that works to protect them from these incidents. How could they possibly be against it?

He continues:

You've probably wondered why the Republicans you've sent to Congress in the past haven't made any headway on shrinking government. It's largely because a motivated constituency stands ready to oppose any significant cut. But a small part of the blame can be assigned to a base that is forever distracted by whatever irrelevant kerfuffle is thrust before it.

It's not a glitch, Mr. Friedersdorf, it's a feature. I spent enough years in the South surrounded by the kinds of people who routinely fall for this nonsense to recognize it instantly: it's all based on what televangelists have been doing successfully for decades, moving people from one manufactured outrage to the next, like some cosmic soap opera, to keep them angry and to keep the money train rolling. Fleecing the flock is a time-honored tradition that right wing politicians have recently adopted. And it works. As Sullivan and others have pointed out, you didn't hear a peep from them concerning deficits when the money was being used for war. And who profited from the war? Mainly defense contractors, politicians and pundits. Not the poor people of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose only real crime is to be in the way of whatever goals the ones that perpetrated the war had. And certainly not the American public, who will bear not just the brunt of the costs but a share of the responsibility for all the death and instability our actions have caused. Reagan proved that deficits don't matter, said Cheney, and he was right. The assorted rubes and marks will buy anything if you sell it the right way. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

There is still, thankfully, a majority of "motivated constituents" who understand that things like Social Security are actually good for them and who don't want to see it ended because a few people want more money than they already have or deserve. Not enough, unfortunately, will stand up to defend the progressive tax which prevented so much money being in the hands of far too people. Which is what we have now.

You see, Mr. Friedersdorf, the plain truth is that conservatives need these manufactured outrages. Because without them, without the constant propaganda, without the voice of Saruman whispering in their ears day in and day out, conservatism would die. Because conservatives have been wrong on every major issue since this country was founded. They supported the British in the Revolutionary War, the slave owners in the Civil War, Gilded Age monopolists, Nazis in the days before the war, segregationists, war profiteers and Wall Street con men then and now, insurance companies who have their own little "death panels" where a human life is just another item on a balance sheet, and any individual or organization that values money and power above anything else. Only through lies and distraction can they continue to pick the pockets of their base.

It's bread and circuses without the bread, Mr. Friedersdorf. And the fact that this country is regressing, that we're tearing up roads because there's no more money to keep them, that we find ourselves wasting time arguing about one manufactured outrage after another, proves that the conservatives are winning. For now. Because the problem is with these outrages is that you always have to keep topping yourself. And the problem with that is that sooner or later things will go too far, because too far is the only possible place things can go. And when that happens, the backlash is powerful and potentially far worse than anything you can imagine now. Reign of Terror? Communist revolution? These things did not occur in a vacuum, sir. They were reactions to what happens when conservatives go too far.

You see, your problem is that you're telling people that there are better ways to advance your goals ideologically. But the truth is that your entire ideology is wrong and always has been. Maybe someday you'll figure that out.

What About Us?

Is Breitbart capable of the kind of epiphany that Shirley Sherrod had about race and class, and which was the true subject of her speech? Would such an epiphany even be possible for him if his paycheck didn't depend on him not having one? Can't the same also be true of anyone who works for the right wing noise machine? What about the Teabaggers who aren't getting paid that kind of money, and who are being suckered into thinking that the cause of their troubles are blacks and hispanics and not the people who will be the true beneficiaries of right wing politics? I mean, at least Breitbart has an excuse. What's theirs?

I think it's time the entire nation, and the entire world, had an epiphany about race and class and about the role of money in terms of how it's been used to make the world a pretty miserable place for most people. But with so many people willing to do anything to protect their position and so many people dependent on money just to survive, is such an epiphany even possible for humans on a big enough scale to change things?

Never mind Breitbart, what about us?

Bragging Rights

One of the things I've come across in the workplace are people who compete with each other to see how hard they work. This happens in small ways, like when people brag about how they'll work through breaks or how many hours they've put in at the job, and it happens in big ways, like people stepping on each other to get a promotion just to earn a few more dollars, managers who see their function as squeezing everything they can out of their employees regardless of circumstance, and owners who intentionally go out and hire these kind of managers. I plead guilty to some of the small stuff myself from time to time, after all, a person likes to feel like they're working hard for their money. When I was a manager I did what I could to make the workplace both profitable and pleasant, and I did a pretty good job. It's unfortunate that my attitude is scorned in twenty-first century America.

I've gotten a lot of grief from some people over the years because of my supposed lack of work ethic, my unwillingness to put up with the usual bullshit that goes on in the workplace, and my inability to fit in socially in any event. Hey, I'm the guy who didn't work for nearly a year because my wife was so sick she needed constant attention. That she spent the last three months of her life in the hospital and that she eventually died from her illness, well, that's just no excuse, in some people's minds.

Now I'm in the fortunate circumstance that what I do really affects only me: that is, I have no one to be responsible for, no children or other dependents who rely on me. If I wind up homeless it's only me who winds up that way, I'm not taking anyone with me. So I obviously can afford to say things like this. I recognize that a lot of people don't have that option, and it's sad that we've built a world where we sometimes force people to choose between what's best for our lives and what we have to do in order to survive. I don't suppose that this will ever entirely go away, but as I've always said, I'm not out to make a perfect world, just a better one.

Because I've spent most of my life without any kind of career focus, and lacking the skill or talent (so far) to make a living straight from that, my future is now pretty precarious. At 48 years old and with a very general, broad range of experience, well, let's just say my odds of employment in any private sector job are pretty slim. My best bet are jobs with city, state, or federal governments, which at least use a more merit-based system for hiring, at least at the entry levels. But I digress.

To those of you who brag about your work ethic and all that, I have news for you: there's kids in other parts of the world right now, eight and ten years old, who are working 18 hours a day, seven days a week. If you aren't familiar with them, you ought to be: they're the ones making your IPhones or the cheap stuff you buy at Wal-Mart, which if they had their way would want the same thing for kids here. I'm not sure what part of let's work ourselves to death appeals to some people, but in the grand scheme of things, we're all just a bunch of lazy bastards compared to these kids. And we're too young to have experienced this firsthand, but there was a time when child labor was the norm in the US, when your life expectancy was to live until you were fifty (if you were lucky). There was a reason people fought and bled and died to end that, it was a miserable existence, and it was because so many fought and bled and died that the people doing the bragging now are living in relative paradise.

As always, I don't have any answers. As long as there's rent and bills that need to be paid, people will do what they have to do to get by. And there will always be people who look to exploit others or who expect everyone to be as dedicated as they are. Being a dick, however, can be very profitable. Edison. Steinbrenner. Hilton. Ford. Limbaugh. I could go on.

We have to do better. We have to see beyond the paycheck, to make work something that's fulfilling both financially and emotionally. And more important, we have to want that and fight for that for everyone in the world, not just Americans in particular or Westerners in general. It's great to feel like you're supporting yourself, why we feel like we have to make ourselves and others miserable doing it, I have no idea.

Not having spent more time at the office isn't something we'll be regretting when our time comes.

Well, I'm Back

So, here I am again.

I can't say that I'll be making many posts on this site any more, I had thought at the New Year (my last post!) that I might be more active on the blog, but obviously things didn't turn out that way. A big reason for that is that I got a job with the Census in January that only just recently ended. But the hard truth is that I haven't really felt that I can add anything to the discourse: mostly I'm just preaching to the choir. I've also been asked if I plan to start up the radio show again and my answer is "not unless someone pays me." Which means a sponsor. As I have said before, I am sick and tired of being asked to donate my time and my money and my skill to a cause while driving myself to the poor house.

As for the job, and what's been going on in my personal life, it's amazing what a difference even six months of steady work can make. I've had enough to pay the rent (haven't missed a rent payment in the 2 ½ years I've been here, that may not seem like much but it's a lot to me) and to buy things like a scanner and a digital camera that let me do more creative things. I've also managed to save some money so that the loss of a job doesn't mean desperate times right away. I know a lot of people are facing them. My current goal is to try to get a job with the public sector (city, state, or federal), because, at my age and with my background, a job in the private sector seems pretty much out of the question.

Some good news is that I'm getting medical care from the VA now, and the doctors there tell me I'm in pretty good shape: blood pressure and cholesterol is normal, and since I'm on meds my blood sugar is stabilizing as well. And I don't pay a dime out of pocket, either. A friend of mine, very right wing, says that I "deserve" it because of my time in the service, but I don't see health care as a matter of "deserving", but also my larger point to him was that this kind of socialized medicine works. I have nothing but good things to say about the VA and the treatment I'm getting from everyone involved there. Since we lost Harvey Pekar this week, maybe I'll go and apply to be a file clerk there, in his honor.

On a more personal note, I've been sticking my toe into the singles scene again, and brother, what I've seen out there makes me appreciate all the more what a wonderful relationship I had with my dear Cathy. It'll be five years in September that she's been gone, and I miss her more than ever. I don't know if I'll ever get married again but at the very least I'd like to have someone to go out and share this wonderful city with.

And the politics? Well, things are still pretty bad and getting worse. It's beyond me how anyone can support the Republican Party, who are doing everything they can to block any type of job creation while simultaneously trying to block extension of unemployment benefits. My friend the Thane says that it's because the politicians and the businesspeople who buy them have lived privileged lives and just assume if they can do it, anyone can. Either way, calling the unemployed "lazy" and screaming about deficits only when it comes to helping poor people, well, I think it's pretty clear whose side they're on, though apparently that's not the case to the people who continue to vote for Republicans.

The oil spill is a catastrophe of course, and a criminal one at that: but it shows how big a grip the large corporations have on our government that the Greenpeace people who vandalized a BP tanker will get more jail time than any BP exec will ever see. What to do about it? I have no idea. Traditional methods of resisting corporate influence seem rather pointless these days. As I expected, the right wing propaganda machine is clicking on all cylinders. It doesn't matter that pretty much everything you hear from it, particularly FOX news and talk radio, is a bald-faced lie, they're telling people what they want to hear, and the ideas that were already pretty much ingrained into some people become solidified, so much so that even when confronted with the facts they continue to believe them. Protesting in the streets in goofy outfits chanting slogans doesn't mean a whole lot compared to that barrage.

I could go on, but as I said, there doesn't seem much point. I've come to the conclusion that we need to hit rock bottom before we can recover from this, and I don't think we're anywhere near that yet. We shrug our shoulders at 10% (and higher) unemployment while corporate profits go through the roof and they lobby for more tax cuts. And the poor will continue to be punished for the crimes of the rich because the poor no longer have anyone who really stands up for them.

I'm sorry I don't have much of anything positive to say. I don't know where things are headed, I hope that things get better eventually but I can't make any promises that they will. The best advice I can give is to say, try and have a little fun, don't let things get you down too much.

Finally, I don't know when my next post will be, or even if there's going to be one. Those of you who haven't done so already can follow me on Facebook, but I only make the occasional political comment there.

Happy New Year

Here's hoping 2010 (aka "The Year We Make Contact") is a better year than 2009.

Here's hoping I'll actually be posting some things, too.

Scamonomics

Paul Krugman writes:

That’s why anyone who is truly concerned about fiscal policy should be anxious to see health reform succeed. If it fails, the demagogues will have won, and we probably won’t deal with our biggest fiscal problem until we’re forced into action by a nasty debt crisis.

Some years back, I wrote a piece called "Waiting For The River To Catch Fire" where I argued that, like with the Cuyahoga River, Americans won't do anything about a serious problem until it gets out of control. I honestly don't believe that we'll achieve any kind of reform without a major economic collapse as we had during the Great Depression. And I think the reason things aren't as bad as they could be is because the GOP wasn't able to destroy the social safety net despite all their efforts. I heard Bernanke say we have to go after Social Security because "that's where the money is". Imagine that, a free-market ideologue (maybe not as bad as Greenspan but close) looking to save capitalism by raiding a socialist government project.

It seems to me that there are, essentially, three kinds of people who oppose health care reform: those who are in on the scam, those who want to be in on the scam, and those who don't know they're being scammed. I say the same thing about people who support the GOP, but the theory still fits. Whatever it may have been before, American capitalism is now nothing more than a scam, and we don't have the political courage to put an end to it.

There ain't no such thing as a free market. Give some people the opportunity to rob you blind and they'll rob you blind. Period.