Quote of the Day

Here is a snippet from the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, a book with an endlessly fascinating take on money, debt, and markets over the long history of civilization:

Another way to look at this might be to say that the new age [1450-1971, the Age of Great Capitalist Empires] came to be increasingly uncomfortable with the political nature of money. Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic -- one reason both politics and magic tend, just ab out everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud

I highly recommend Graeber's book for an alternative analysis of money, debt, and markets. You may not agree with his analysis, but he will help you broaden your understanding through his deep understanding of anthropology/history deeply rooted in 5,000 years of human civilization.

The Story of America

The great middle class society known as "America" is dead. Dead as a dodo. Buried by the "greed is good" 1980s and the glorification of "me first" family values of the political right over the last few decades.

Here is a nice summary by Bob Lefsetz in his blog The Lefsetz Letter:

What Happened To My Country?

My father was a real estate appraiser.

He started out as an engineer, but that lasted less than a year, he wasn’t an ass-kisser, he couldn’t play the game, he was bounced out.

So he opened a liquor store and tried his hand at commercial real estate. Unsuccessfully, because he didn’t have enough money to purchase property.

Trying to improve his lot in life, he relocated the package store next to an exit by the newly-finished I-95, otherwise known as the Connecticut Turnpike. And when redevelopment hit Bridgeport, his friend Maury Magilnick said no one knew as much about local real estate as my dad, and if he became an appraiser, he’d hire him.

My father spent a week at UConn. Another at the University of Chicago. He got licensed. And with his engineering background and his natural acumen he became a legend in the state, Attorneys General feared him, and my dad garnered the income of a doctor or a lawyer, he sent three children to private universities and graduate schools.

That dream is dead today.

I’m in Vail, Colorado. My family started skiing when I was ten. Used to be an egalitarian sport, you saw Beetles in the parking lot, sandwiches were de rigueur in the base lodge, brought from home. Skiers were not the upper crust, they were us.

No more.

So I’m riding up the lift with a fourth year medical student. I ask him what he’s gonna be.

"An anesthesiologist."

Why? Because he loves it? No, because he can make good bread and vacation and live the high life.

I’d like to tell you I met some musicians on the lift, some regular people, but I kid you not when I tell you the only people I met were in finance. Oh, and there was one dentist.

They traded for the family account. They were "consultants". They worked for hedge funds. They had their own private ski instructors, at $700 a day. They were the 1%.

And everybody in America is scrambling to get into the club.

That’s what’s wrong with the music business. The executives want to be as rich as the bankers, they too want to fly in private jets and tip with hundred dollar bills. What is the right tip these days? For a ride through town? I’m thinking $20, because the bankers have driven up the rate and the employees expect it and they’re struggling to make ends meet.

I grew up in the sixties. We were all in it together. Sure, my dad told me to be a lawyer, so he didn’t have to worry about me, but instead of taking the LSAT, I went to Montreal. There were no corporate recruiters on campus. Life was about personal fulfillment.

But now life is about money.

Either you’ve got it or you’re struggling to get it.

That wannabe anesthesiologist? He’s a Republican. He doesn’t want socialized medicine and he doesn’t want taxes.

Nobody wants taxes. Everybody thinks life is a personal struggle, that there’s no common infrastructure, no freeways, no police department, no power utility.

What’s mine is mine.

And if you don’t watch out, I’m gonna take yours.

No wonder musicians sell out to the Fortune 500. They too want to be rich. But the joke is upon them, they can never be that rich, the corporations laugh at them, they’re pawns in their game.

We live in a completely duplicitous country where no one’s honest, no one does what he believes in, everybody’s just motivated by the money.

And the problem?

PUBLIC EMPLOYEES!

Those teachers ruined the economy. Hell, you can barely make it on a teacher’s salary, you can’t vacation in Vail, Colorado, you’re closed out.

And somehow we accept all this. We shrug our shoulders and say it’s the way it is and will always be.

Why?

I feel like I’ve been asleep for thirty-odd years. While I was pursuing my dream, everybody else was pursuing the dollar. Reagan made greed legitimate and the baby boomers filled that hole and now their kids want more of the same. They just want to play on their hand-helds and feed at the trough. No one wants to innovate, they just want to get rich.

Ever speak to someone in finance? It’s a rare bird who likes it.

They do it for the money.

And with this money they buy up those concert tickets so you can’t get a good seat. They’ve got a shortage of time. When they get to the amusement park, they want to close you out. Get concierge treatment, cut the line…and you think this is okay because you think you’re gonna be rich too.

Ain’t that a laugh.

At least at Middlebury I saw what rich was.

Most people can’t afford a private college education any longer. 50k a year? Hell, public education keeps going up and up. Most people never even get into the game they think they’re gonna win.

There’s a ruling class, pulling the strings, and you’re not a member.

This is not a Democratic or Republican issue. This is a money issue. Money’s corrupted the system. You’ve got to be on the take to get elected. So you’re beholden to the corporations, not the people.

But you’ve read Steve Jobs’s biography and you think you’re gonna make it.

Don’t you get it? The odds of music success are infinitesimal, all the things you want most musicians haven’t got, a house, a spouse, kids, health insurance…

Don’t be angry with me.

And don’t be angry with the music business titans, keeping you out. They’re just worrying about themselves, they don’t care about you, they just want to live in a gated community and vacation where you aren’t.

They’re revolting in Russia. And they overthrew the government in a bunch of Middle Eastern countries. And if you don’t think it can happen here, you’re nuts.

Everybody thinks just because people have flat screens, they’re happy. But have you been following the shenanigans in cable? You’re paying for all this stuff you don’t watch just to keep rich people rich.

Music is a game for the poor. A place where the uneducated with no status can get a bit of notoriety and money. And as long as someone makes it, no one pays attention to the real problem.

The game is rigged.

You’re gonna be left behind unless you start making yourself number one and doing what’s expedient to get ahead.

What kind of country is that?

Not one I want to live in.

P.S. That great middle class of yore? It created the classic rock you’re still listening today. Music was a reasonable pursuit, rock stars were as rich as anybody in America. That framework expired decades ago, rock stars are no longer rich. There are bankers who make $20 million a year every year! So the Grace Slicks of today, people born with a silver spoon in their mouths, don’t go into the arts, it just doesn’t pay. Tom Rush was a Harvard graduate. He revolutionized the folk circuit, he pioneered the singer-songwriter game. Now we’ve just got poor people rapping about Benzes and boats. How fulfilling is that? I get it, they want in. But you used to follow your dreams, not the dollar. But now if you ain’t got the moolah, you’re gonna have a heart attack and no health insurance and you’re gonna be bankrupted. Hell, the dirty little secret is one health episode puts many people in bankruptcy even when they have insurance! But we’ve got to have less corporate regulation and as far as health insurance goes…you’re on your own. Don’t you see, health insurance is a metaphor for our entire country! Can you imagine someone writing "Get Together" today? Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together and love one another right now… Who sings about that? Chumps.

The Occupy movement is trying to raise the dead, get the 99.99% to rise up against the rapacious 0.01% who have bought the politicians and dictate the rules that has put America on a path careening downwards towards doom.

Reclaiming America

Here is Lawrence Lessig on a new coalition to educate Americans about the corrupting influence of big money in politics and their society:

Lawrence Lessig Welcomes Rootstrikers to United Republic from Rootstrikers on Vimeo.

More details at unitedrepublic.org.

"Honest" Graft in the US Congress

Here is a video from CBS News that reviews the corruption and graft among pretty well everybody in Congress. If you can put up with all the intrusive commercials by CBS, watch this:



This video includes all kind of "assurances" by the politicians that they "never traded on any non-public information" while all the details in this financial affairs makes it very clear that they have an extraordinary ability to make financial transations just after their public role gives them access to non-public information. What an odd coincidence. And they all put their hands over their hearts and assure the public that they are as honest as the day is long. And the fact that they make millions while in office off these "lucky" trades is simply beyond credibility. They are corrupt. Thoroughly corrupt.

The CBS report is based on this book by Peter Schweizer:

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Higher Education in America

The government has decided that classroom professors are not getting "the message" across to students and have unleashed the police with batons to club and spear peacefully protesting students. This is a very important lesson about "power" in America:



More details from Berkleyside.

The top 0.01% control the politicians, the courts, and the police. So when students don't respect the right of the rich to plunder the middle class and impoverish the poor, then a little "school lesson" is needed with billy clubs to "beat some sense" into students.

Sadly, that is America. Land of the "free to be beaten up". Gone are the days of free speech and the right to assemble. These are they days when you need to buy your political rights just like the billionaires have so successfully done.

Update 2011nov13: Here is a bit from the student newspaper The Daily Californian:

For UC Berkeley graduate student Alex Barnard, the most disempowering moment of Wednesday night was not when he was repeatedly hit with a police baton, cracking one of his ribs. Instead, the most disturbing moment of his experience came afterward, when he says an officer told him he had “no rights.”

According to Barnard, who was arrested along 31 others as part of Wednesday night’s Occupy Cal demonstration, after he was handcuffed with a zip tie and taken into Sproul Hall, a police officer asked him for identifying information. Rather than immediately answering, Barnard said he asked the officer about his rights and when he would be allowed to speak to a lawyer. It was then that the officer told him he had no rights and, after Barnard disputed the statement, said he would be recorded as “uncooperative” on his police forms, according to Barnard.

“You didn’t have a voice,” Barnard said.

The experience described by Barnard and his fellow protesters’ violent treatment at the hands of the police — supported by video footage taken at the demonstration — has led to wide-spread condemnation of the police response. Critics ranging from campus student groups to members of the UC Berkeley faculty and even the national media have spoken out against the police officers’ use of force.

According to a campus-wide email sent by Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and other top campus administrators, the campus Police Review Board will investigate whether police used excessive force given the circumstances.

Go read the original news story to get all the details and the embedded links.

I love it when the official have "an official investigation". It is just a way to bury the item. These students were assaulted by the police. No policeman was arrested for assault. The "investigation" will find "extenuating circumstances" and the whole thing will be buried. That is how the elites make sure that nobody rocks the boat. You have no rights. Sure you have lots of "paper" rights, but money in America owns all the "rights". Until the people change that, the standard of living in the US will continue to decline and the government will continue on its path to banana republic.

Update2011nov14: Here is a bit from a well thought out analysis of the hypocrisy of the UC Berkeley authorities by Aaron Bady on his blog zunguzungu. It also has more video and some detailed comments and specifics. But the key point is this:

I feel a lot of déjà vu in reading about these events. According to the UC administration, who have offered a lot of empty words in support of Occupy Wall Street in past emails, it wasn’t the aims of the protesters they opposed but their tactics. As they go on to elaborate:

This decision is largely governed by practical, not philosophical, considerations. We are not equipped to manage the hygiene, safety, space, and conflict issues that emerge when an encampment takes hold and the more intransigent individuals gain control. Our intention in sending out our message early was to alert everyone that these activities would not be permitted. We regret that, in spite of forewarnings, we encountered a situation where, to uphold our policy, we were required to forcibly remove tents and arrest people.

Allow me to retort: what they really mean is that the University of California is not, in fact, governed by “a philosophy,” but by the reverse: an active refusal to require a philosophy in justifying its choices. That way he can write that “UC Berkeley as an institution shares many of the highest principles associated with the OWS movement,” but also actively work in opposition to people’s attempts to put those principles into practice. This is an arbitrary line in the sand, drawn by an administration that is unflinchingly willing to use whatever means necessary to maintain their ability to draw arbitrary lines. Your philosophy is not wanted here, they are saying; in the name of practical considerations — which they define — you will be governed by government. And so the fact that students are trying to “democratize the regents,” as a popular chant puts it, is exactly the threat. A sentence like this one:

We are not equipped to manage the hygiene, safety, space, and conflict issues that emerge when an encampment takes hold and the more intransigent individuals gain control.

is just another way of saying that when “intransigent” individuals refuse to acknowledge the university’s authority, the administration won’t be able to exercise its authority, so it will therefore need to exercise its authority. This is exactly as tautological and contradictory a line of “reasoning” as it sounds, a rhetorical snake eating its own tail. To maintain hygiene, the students cannot use tents to keep themselves warm; to manage the space, students must be kept out; to address “conflict issues,” students had to be attacked; and to keep the students safe, they will be beaten.

The language falls apart at this point, because it’s not “philosophy” that’s driving any of this, but the question of who has the right to speak and be heard about what the university is for. Which is why the next paragraph truly descends into absurdity, the one where you realize you are not dealing with an educator, but with a university Ministry of Truth:

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

What he describes — occupying space in a way that nonviolently prevents the police from doing what they want — is actually the very definition of “non-violent civil disobedience.” On the one hand, it is utterly non-violent: linking arms and holding on to each other as the police try to knock you apart is not “violent” but is precisely the opposite. It is the endurance of violence. And second, it is civil disobedience, again, precisely by definition. They were disobeying civil authorities, obeying the authority of their own consciences and solidarity instead

I want to skim past this sentence on to the next part, however which is in some ways the most remarkable part: he argues that the “tradition of peaceful civil disobedience,” which deserves honor, is a tradition of obedience to civil authorities. He says that “we honor” those who do not obstruct the administration’s decisions, and that those who are “acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience” are, it turns out, those who obey authority.

This is not even ideology. This is simply nonsense. UCI professor Rei Terada has a great piece on what the administrator’s language might mean, but for me the important point to make is a much simpler one: they aren’t defending what they did — which would require admitting what they did — but only obfuscating it in language so bad that I can’t decide whether to call it vapid or actively dishonest. “Civil Disobedience” has always been, manifestly and unmistakably, a tradition of disobeying the civil authorities. I feel silly even needing to spell that out. And I feel embarrassed to work as an educator in the employ of anyone who would stand behind such specious stupidity. Linking arms and occupying the space between the police and their objective is a tactic used by just about every example of civil disobedience I can think of. It is, quite frankly the single best and most iconic example of the thing he says it is not. He is chewing up these words until they have become meaningless. Calling this language “Orwellian” is not hyperbole or exaggeration.

If he wants, Chancellor Birgeneau can approve of what the police did on Wednesday. If he wants to believe and argue that it is justifiable to try to break the bodies of students in hope of breaking their spirits, then let him believe it and argue it and then try to justify it. Let him tell us that when students put up tents on Sproul Plaza, the police will beat them until they take those tents down. Let him declare forthrightly that when students stand on grass at the wrong time and place — a time that is subject to the capricious and arbitrary decrees of the police and those who call them in — the administration believes its authority and responsibility is to beat them until they comply.

They have not said this. Birgeneau and his executive administrators are hiding behind meaningless language rather than talk openly and honestly about what everyone who was there or has seen those videos knows to be true: the UC will hurt you if you obstruct them or challenge their authority, even nonviolently. Free speech is a function of free thinking, and on the campus of free speech, Birgeneau should be free to say and think what he pleases, even if what he says is that those who do not obey will be beaten into submission. But let us hear him say that, if that’s what he believes. Let him admit and stand behind the decision he has made.

The Orwellian Media

George Orwell did a great service to humanity with his book 1984, a parody of the Soviet state and Orwell's fears that the West would go down the same path into totalitarianism.

We live in a society where the elites, especially the media, seem intent on achieving a 1984 reality. Here is a post by Paul Krugman on the zombie-like "truths" that the media foist on their readership:

Legends Of The Rentiers

I feel Dean Baker’s pain. Dean is exercised over an NPR report which says that Argentina is suffering from its 2001 default — a claim that is totally at odds with the evidence. Argentina actually did very well by thumbing its nose at creditors.

This isn’t the only case where news organizations consistently report as truth something that didn’t happen, while failing to report what did. Another one that comes to mind is the California electricity crisis of 2001-2002. As some readers may recall, that crisis was caused by market manipulation — and that’s not a hypothesis, Enron traders were caught on tape telling plants to shut down to create artificial shortages. Yet “news analyses” published after the whole thing was revealed would often tell readers that excessive environmental regulation and Nimbyism caused the crisis, with nary a mention of the deliberate creation of shortages.

And as you’ll notice, in both cases the imaginary history just happened to be one more comfortable to status quo interests.

I don’t want to go all Chomsky here, but this sort of thing really can radicalize you.

What makes this particularly disgusting is that the media are paid to ferret out "the truth" and to spend time distilling the truth through "journalistic analysis". But, instead, they repeat the mantras of our 1% overlords. For this they expect to get paid?

No wonder there are tens of thousands marching day after day in the Occupy XYZ movement. Enough with the lies! Enough with the manipulation by the 1% elites. Enough with buying and selling politicians and the corruption of money in democracy.

A Very Important Question about Debt

Barry Ritholtz asks a very important question about the accumulated debt of the US:

Here is a quick look at total debt as accumulated by each US President.

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Its kinda funny — how come so few people (especially those on the right) were all that upset about the massive surge in debt under Bush? Is it that they only recently kinda figured out the significance of debt — or are they are merely hypocrites when it comes to this sort of thing?

Whatever your political or economic views are, it is not up to me to tell you what to believe. However, you need to be intellectually consistent and not merely grab whatever ideological bullet point that suits your purposes at the moment. If you do so, you best be prepared to be charged with being intellectually dishonest, and to be categorized as called a political hack. Or worse.

I think the answer is pretty obvious. The political right is hypocritical. Their only goal is to get power. They are willing to destroy the economy to obtain power. When in power they have no principles other than to line their own pockets and use money to buy votes. For over thirty years they have claimed to need to be elected to effect a social agenda that favours the concerns of fundamentalist Christians, but once in power they never seem able to ban abortion, shoot the gays, or force everybody to attend church on Sunday. They are only effective in giving tax cut after tax cut to the ultra-rich. Odd isn't it?

How a Revolution can be Derailed

Here is a story from CBS's Sixty Minutes that shows how the Egyptian military has squashed the "people's revolution".



The history of popular revolts and revolution is rife with examples like this. The rich and powerful do not easily give way. They find many ways to sneak back into power.

It is truly sad to see that the people's will has been thwarted. It is especially disgusting to see that the US government (via Leon Panetta, the US Secretary of Defense giving the US's blessing to the Egyptian generals) is backing this clampdown on the people's push for real democracy. Obama claims to support democracy in the Middle East, but Obama's actions belie that claim. The US is still playing the dictator/repressive military regime card to "secure American interests" in the region. Shame!

Call me cynical, but the internecine street battles between Copts and Muslims strikes me as evidence of manipulation by the generals to get people to fight among themselves rather than to focus on the corrupt military regime. Read this news from the UK's Guardian newspaper.

The above story should be a cautionary tale for the Occupy Wall Street attempt to bring democracy back to America and out the corruption of money in politics. There is much violence and many dead ends that can await this movement. Hopefully not. But idealists need to keep a sense of realism. Getting the choke hold of the ultra-rich and big corporations off the democracy can be an ugly, ugly struggle.

How the Media Makes up "Facts"

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the NY city The Village Voice newspaper. It highlights how the NY Times newspaper in a matter of minutes "changes" the news from one of demonstrators being allowed onto a bridge then cut off and arrested to a much more hostile account where the demonstrators confront the police and force them into arresting a disorderly crowd.

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From The Village Voice:

The above photo of juxtaposed screenshots from the New York Times website has been making the rounds on Facebook, and it shows two very different takes for the same story on yesterday's Brooklyn Bridge arrests. The screenshot on the left, from 6:59 p.m., appears to reflect what many protesters are saying: The police tricked them into marching on the bridge. At 7:19 p.m., any mention of the police allowing demonstrators onto the bridge was removed from the lede. Why did they make this change?

We asked City Room Bureau Chief Andy Newman, and he said the following:

At every point yesterday as the story unfolded, we offered the most complete account we could of a large and chaotic scene that could not be grasped by any one person. The earlier version had almost no input from the police. The later version reflected the accounts of the police, protesters and of course our reporters at the scene. The later version, read in its entirety (not just the one highlighted sentence in that photo), reflected the various perspectives much more thoroughly. The final version of the piece was more thorough still.

It's worth noting that one of their reporters at the scene, freelancer Natasha Lennard, was among the over 700 arrested. The original City Room report that Lennard contributed to says that police did in fact allow protesters onto the bridge:

After allowing marchers from the Occupy Wall Street protests to claim the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge and get partway across, the police cut the marchers off and plunged into the crowd and began making arrests around 4:15 p.m. Saturday.

That paragraph is now nowhere in the story. Currently, the only mentions in the piece of police telling protesters they were allowed onto the bridge are in the words of the protesters themselves.

The wonderful thing about those with money and power: they get to define reality. The bottom 90% have to patch together bits and pieces to uncover what has been covered up. We live in lies all our life struggling to know what is really going on. It is those at the top who manipulate and deceive in order to protect their power. The media is owned by the ultra-rich. In the final analysis, the ultra-rich get to decide what is "news" that is fit for the rest of us to see. And of course, the ultra-rich help "guide" the police in "doing their duty".

In a "strange coincidence" the Wall Street bank JP Morgan Chase has decided now is the right time to "donate" to the NY Police:

A coincidence, I'm sure, but it sure is poetic. Just as the Occupy Wall Street movement was picking up speed, JPMorgan Chase donated what the financial organization itself described as "an unprecedented" $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, part of which will be used to boost surveillance systems. Well isn't that special.

The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD's main data center.

Wow! What a remarkable "coincidence".

The Future is Closer Than You Think

The day of using science to manipulate unwilling subjects has drawn just a bit closer. Here are some bits from a fascinating post by Mo Costandi in the UK's Guardian newspaper's Neurophilosophy blog:

Magnetic pulses applied to a specific region of the frontal cortex can influence peoples' willingness to lie spontaneously or tell the truth, according to a new study by researchers from Estonia.

The findings, published recently in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, suggest that manipulations of brain activity could be an effective way of obtaining truthful responses from defendants and criminal suspects, raising more ethical questions about the application of neuroscience technologies in the legal profession.

...

The ability to detect deception accurately is of great interest to the legal profession and security agencies, for obvious reasons. The use of brain scanning data as evidence in courts of law has proven to be highly controversial, not least of all because of doubts about the validity of the data. Some researchers argue that we are now in a position to use functional neuroimaging to detect lies, but the general consensus seems to be that neither the technology nor our understanding of the brain are sophisticated enough.

Bachmann is cautious about how to interpret the new findings, because the sample size of 16 participants is small. He adds that they should be replicated before any firm conclusions can be made about the effects of TMS on spontaneous lying. Even so, the study raises the possibility that TMS could be used to increase the likelihood of getting the truth out of suspects or defendants. It seems likely that some may develop the technique and offer it as a service, as was the case with brain scanning.

"Provided that the method is validated and legal norms are established, it could perhaps be allowed and justified," says Bachmann, "but this should not become a routinely used technique. Basic human rights include cognitive privacy and this would be a clear infringement. If a subject freely agrees, maybe it would make sense, but I foresee heated debates on whether 'knocking truth out of the fellow' can be legalized in principle."

I'm sure the dictatorships and autocrats are clapping with glee. The day when they can reduce their subject population to automatons run remotely by the whims of the ruling class have just taken a big step forward. All hail Big Brother!

The Last Bastion of Freedom?

So much for press freedom in the US. Here is the personal story of a PBS reporter being arrested and thrown into jail for 9 hours for standing on the sidewalk and trying to interview pepper-sprayed demonstrators:

When I saw the young women get pepper sprayed, I ran over to interview them. While holding a microphone and wearing a badge identifying myself as an employee of “WNET – New York Public Media,” I found myself suddenly roped into one of the large nets. I was thrown against a wall and handcuffed with hard plastic zip-tie restraints. I sat on the sidewalk with about 50 others. I yelled over and over “I’m press! I’m with WNET MetroFocus! Please do not arrest me.”

I did not possess the press credentials that NYPD allocates to journalists. (As MetroFocus is less than three months old, neither I nor my journalist colleagues have yet met the NYPD’s qualifications.) So even though I work as a professional journalist, the NYPD lumped me in with everybody else.

Lumped me in indeed. I was in police custody for nine hours, eight of which I spent in a jail cell at the 1st Precinct.

An NYPD spokesperson told MetroFocus on Monday that 87 people have been arrested in total since the Occupy Wall Street protests began last weekend; however, the Daily News reported that at least 80 people were arrested on Sept. 24 alone, mostly on charges of disorderly conduct and obstructing traffic. The NYPD would not comment further on my arrest.

...

I also met Rosa A., 33, in the police van while we were being transported to the 1st Precinct for processing. She had been shopping at the Barnes and Noble on Union Square when she saw the protesters outside. As many New Yorkers do when they see something unusual, she snapped a picture. And she was arrested.

“I’ve never been arrested,” said Rosa A., in visible pain from the plastic handcuffs. “I was just there looking at magazines.” She laughed, lightening the mood in the police van. Even our arresting officer, in the van with us, chuckled.

The rich on Wall Street never have to worry about this grubby reality of dealing with brutal police. They can buy their "justice". For the rest of us, to make democracy work we have to demonstrate to get politicians to pay attention. And that means being roughed up and jailed for exercising the "guaranteed freedoms" of the Constitution. As Anatole France so succinctly put it:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

Sadly, for the average Joe in America they don't realize the "Mr. Policeman is Your Friend" is only true if you are a billionaire. If you live on an average pay cheque, the police are there to make sure you don't linger too long near the property of the ultra-rich.

The good news for all these arrested people is that unlike the shattered societies that the US has created in Afghanistan and Iraq where the "police" are as likely to take you out in the desert and put a bullet in your head as to take you to jail, in the US the police can be brutal and the courts can be slow, but usually you can "get off" after you tell your story to a judge. But as the society gets more like a banana republic and the judges are all from the ultra-rich, it is much more likely that the judges will find you guilty even if you claim to have only stepped out of a store to "take a picture of a demonstration". And it is much more likely that a certain percentage of people will simply "disappear" in the "judicial" system never to be seen or heard from again.

Dominic Streatfeild's "A History of the World Since 9/11"

This is an excellent history of our times. I expected a typical history of events, leaders, and themes. But instead this author presents 8 chapters which introduce a policy stance then burrows down to look at a small handful of "ordinary" people affected by the policy. The author's intent is to lay bare just how badly wrong the "war on terror" has gone. Here is a nice summary of the author's view from the Epilogue:

Outspoken liberals like to display their hatred of the lead players behind the War on Terror. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair: the villains of the piece. The truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, nobody covered themselves with glory. Opposition political parties failed to intervene; the military failed to stand behind its beliefs that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan required better resourcing, manpower and planning; the intelligence community failed to insist that caveats in the products were there for a reason. The media failed to inform the public there were serious problems. Perhaps the blame should be shared? There's enough to go round.

Doubtless there is a case to be made that the world changed as a result of 9/11. But how it changed was not up to Bin Laden, al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It was up to us. We could have reacted differently. We didn't.

As a result, the situation in which we currently find ourselves is not one that has been thrust upon us. It's one that we have chosen. Al-Qaeda doesn't threaten our existence. It never did. Our reaction to it just might.

The book has some wonderfuly graphic stories of individuals and the very real effects of 9/11 on them:

• Chapter 1 looks at Bush's dictum that "the rules have changed" and that "we must take the war to them" and that pre-emptive war was necessary. It ties this with a crazy criminal character in Texas who goes unhinged after seeing the towers fall on 9/11 and decides to go after "the enemy". For him this is anybody ethnically Middle Easternish and he ends up killing an innocent immigrant from India, a Hindu. Streatfeild lays out these characters in great detail. The hard struggle by the Hindu to build a life in America and provide a business built on serving his customers. A very nice guy who worked hard but ended up killed by a madman lashing out at "enemies" to pre-empt their attack on his beloved America. A madman with a criminal past and a mind twisted by drug abuse and violence. Tragic.


• Chapter 2 looks at the "gloves are off" and "the rules have changed. It focuses on a family fleeing Iraq prior to 9/11 but who get caught at sea in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and harshly interned by Australia. The Australians tried to turn away the boat but the desperate immigrants tried everything to prevent being turned away. The brutal treatment left many deeply injured, some insane, from the years spent in limbo under vicious treatment by an anti-refugee policy by Australia. Tragic.


• Chapter 3 looks at the idea that the "war on terror" had to be fought viciously and that all deaths were the fault of al Qaeda and not of those in the West responding to having been attacked. This chapter looks at the excited and joyous planning of a wedding in Afghanistan. Unfortunately this was in the home province of Mullah Omar and the Americans with their "too little boots on the ground" incompetent intelligence decide that Mullah Omar will show up at the wedding. So they unleash the hell fire of US weapons on innocent people 48 were killed and 117 wounded. This disturbing story is only one of many, many in Afghanistan over a decade of "mistakes" by Americans in their war against a nearly invisible enemy.


• Chapter 8 looks at the "unintended consequences" of a war. In this case, it focuses on the world-wide program to eradicate polio. This program was within a year or two or three of success when 9/11 happened. Sadly, it now appears the world has utterly failed to eradicate polio and since there is now billions with no experience with the disease and many hundreds of millions of children with no immunity, the disease is poised to strike back worse than it was during the height of the great polio epidemics of the mid-20th century. This chapter focuses on the tale of a very dedicated, wonderful doctor who struggles to complete the fight against polio in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Sadly, the Muslims come to believe that the vaccine is a Western plot to sterilize them and that the drugs given to them are adulterated with female hormones and pig fat, they refuse the vaccine. Worse, they blow up the car in which the vaccine team is traveling and kill several including this doctor. Another tragic "consequence" of the war.

The other chapters focus on big policy themes and make them real by looking at the level of individual lives. It is all very tragic. But it makes this book especially powerful and poignant. Wars have consequences. How you fight them is very important. Sadly, the Bush administration was cavalier (cowboyish?) in its conduct of a war that has now killed hundreds and soon thousands more than were ever killed on 9/11.

One final quote from the book to hammer home the obscenities that have come out of "the war on terrorism":

Meanwhile, most of these nations seized on the exceptional nature of the post-9/11 threat, then used it as a justification for enacting domestic legislation that aped US policy regarding human rights: restrictions of rights for foreigners and asylum seekers; indefinite incarceration of suspects without trial; withdrawal of the right to an attorney; suspension of habeas corpus; enhanced surveillance techniques. The list went on and on.

'I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups to kill and destroy,' conceded Lord Hoffmann in a famous judgement on the incarceration of terror suspects without trial in the United Kingdom in December 2004. 'But they do not threaten the life of the nation.' The real threat to the United Kingdom, he warned, 'comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.'

Five years later, the Human Rights Council's Eminent Panel of Jurists on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights agreed. After an exhaustive three-year study of the effects of the War on Terror on human rights globally, the Panel concluded that human rights protections, assembled over the last sixty years, had been corroded to the point where the international legal order was in jeopardy. Especially worrying was that the nations that had previously argued for the primacy of human rights were the very same nations now busily opting out of them. The result was 'perhaps one of the most serious challenges ever posed to the integrity of a system carefully constructed after the Second World War.'

Everybody should read this book. It will make them sit up and pay attention to the "war" that has been conducted "on their behalf". It will change their way of viewing the world.

Just the Facts Ma'am

Here is a post by Dean Baker on his Beat the Post blog that points out just who inside the Federal Reserve is working hard to sabotage the US economy: the private sector banks!

A segment on Morning Edition noted that 3 members of the Fed's Open Market Committee (FOMC) opposed the plan to shift from shorter term debt to holding longer term bonds in an effort to drive down interest rates. It would have been worth mentioning that all 3 of the no votes came from the district bank presidents. The bank presidents are essentially appointed by the banks in the district.

The 5 bank presidents who are voting members of the FOMC split 3-2 against this measure. By contrast, the 5 Fed governors who were appointed through the political process (by both Presidents Bush and Obama) voted 5-0 in support further action.

This is a striking split between the FOMC members who essentially represent banks and the members who were appointed by democratically elected officials. It would have been worth mentioning this fact in this story. (The NYT and the Post commited the same sin.)

I guess the rich and powerful are nice and comfy with their wealth and their ability to strangle the economy for their own benefit. Why let the bottom 99% have a better life if this might inconvenience or threaten the ultra-rich?

How the Political Right Attacks Workers

Here is another post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog that demonstrates how the political right uses "facts" to attack workers by giving the false impression that their pensions are an immense burden:

The Washington Post used a front page story to scare readers about public sector pensions, implying that they faced an enormous unfunded liability. It refers to "states facing, by one estimate, a combined $3 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities."

It is unlikely that readers are able to assess the meaning of this $3 trillion figure in any meaningful way. It is worth noting first that it assumes that the stock market will provide a return that is approximately half of its historic average over the next three decades. If the economy and profits grow as projected, it would be necessary for stock prices to fall so much that they would have to be negative before the end of the 30-year period over which pensions are typically evaluated.

If we take the more typical figure of $1 trillion and compare it to future GDP, it is equal to approximately 0.2 percent of projected GDP over the 30 year planning period. By comparison, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have added approximately 1.6 percentage points of GDP to the military budget. This means that the unfunded liability of state and local pensions is approximately one eighth as large as the costs of these wars. This sort of context might have been helpful to readers.

In reporting the size of Rhode Island's pensions it would have been helpful to remind readers that many of these workers do not collect Social Security. That means their pensions are often their entire retirement income.

The top 1% owns the media, so they can get their propaganda out and repeat it and repeat it using the "big lie" technique that works very effectively to convince people of a falsehood. Meanwhile, the bottom 90% has no mechanism to get out a message to defend their interests.

The Cruel Criminality at the Heart of America

Here is a bit from an article entitled "The Great Bank Robbery" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Spitznagel and published by CNN's Fareed Zakaria in his Global Public Square:

For the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. In the United States, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion. Extrapolating over the coming decade, the numbers would approach $5 trillion, an amount vastly larger than what both President Barack Obama’s administration and his Republican opponents seem willing to cut from further government deficits.

That $5 trillion dollars is not money invested in building roads, schools and other long-term projects, but is directly transferred from the American economy to the personal accounts of bank executives and employees. Such transfers represent as cunning a tax on everyone else as one can imagine. It feels quite iniquitous that bankers, having helped cause today’s financial and economic troubles, are the only class that is not suffering from them – and in many cases are actually benefiting.

Mainstream megabanks are puzzling in many respects. It is (now) no secret that they have operated so far as large sophisticated compensation schemes, masking probabilities of low-risk, high-impact “Black Swan” events and benefiting from the free backstop of implicit public guarantees. Excessive leverage, rather than skills, can be seen as the source of their resulting profits, which then flow disproportionately to employees, and of their sometimes-massive losses, which are borne by shareholders and taxpayers.

In other words, banks take risks, get paid for the upside, and then transfer the downside to shareholders, taxpayers, and even retirees.

Go read the rest of the article. It has more details.

The authors point out the cruel irony of the situation for average Americans:

So the facts are clear. But, as individual taxpayers, we are helpless, because we do not control outcomes, owing to the concerted efforts of lobbyists, or, worse, economic policymakers. Our subsidizing of bank managers and executives is completely involuntary.

The author's go on to plead with the big investment companies to use their money to try and discipline America's criminal banks. But that isn't going to happen. The investment companies rub elbows with the bankers and go to the same country clubs and own houses around the world at the same locations as the bankers. They live an insulated life. In their world the bankers are "just one of the fellows". For the investment companies and the banks, the real "threat to America" is the bottom 90% of the population who still have a right to vote and an aspiration to wrest control back from the financial overlords.

The rich aren't going to do a favour for the bottom 90% and "discipline" the bankers. The bottom 90% have to seize back control from the criminal rich. The bottom 90% have got to realize that the Barack Obama's are in the pocket of the rich and that almost all the politicians are poodles of the rich. It is going to take a social revolution of immense scope and depth to seize back control from the rich. And this shouldn't be done with the wild-eyed idea of "revolution". That is nutty. It will take decades and it requires the hard world of education and political organizing. It will require discipline. If it is to be effective it must be done through traditional institutions. To try to short cut things simply means replacing one set of criminals with a new set of criminals.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous

For me the 1980s were a nightmare. America fell in love with the TV show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I found it wretched to think that people "adored" the rich because of their wealth. But the era from 1980 to now has been marked by this deference to the rich and powerful

People need to wake up from their illusions. This story from CNN should help. Here is yet another story of "lifestyles of the rich and famous" where the curtain is peeled back and you can see the corruption and meanness and the evil that lurks behind the glitter:

As we were about to leave, one of the staff told us there was a nanny who worked for Hannibal Gadhafi who might speak to us. He said she'd been burnt by Hannibal's wife, Aline.

I thought he meant perhaps a cigarette stubbed out on her arm. Nothing prepared me for the moment I walked into the room to see Shweyga Mullah.

At first I thought she was wearing a hat and something over her face. Then the awful realization dawned that her entire scalp and face were covered in red wounds and scabs, a mosaic of injuries that rendered her face into a grotesque patchwork.

Even though the burns were inflicted three months ago, she was clearly still in considerable pain. But she told us her story calmly.

She'd been the nanny to Hannibal's little son and daughter.

The 30-year-old came to Libya from her native Ethiopia a year ago. At first things seemed OK, but then six months into her employment she said she was burned by Aline.

Three months later the same thing happened again, this time much more seriously.

In soft tones, she explained how Aline lost her temper when her daughter wouldn't stop crying and Mullah refused to beat the child.

"She took me to a bathroom. She tied my hands behind my back, and tied my feet. She taped my mouth, and she started pouring the boiling water on my head like this," she said, imitating the vessel of scalding hot water being poured over her head.

She peeled back the garment draped carefully over her body. Her chest, torso and legs are all mottled with scars -- some old, some still red, raw and weeping. As she spoke, clear liquid oozed from one nasty open wound on her head.

After one attack, "There were maggots coming out of my head, because she had hidden me, and no one had seen me," Mullah said.

Eventually, a guard found her and took her to a hospital, where she received some treatment.

But when Aline Gadhafi found out about the kind actions of her co-worker, he was threatened with imprisonment, if he dared to help her again.

"When she did all this to me, for three days, she wouldn't let me sleep," Mullah said. "I stood outside in the cold, with no food. She would say to staff, 'If anyone gives her food, I'll do the same to you.' I had no water -- nothing."

Her colleague, a man from Bangladesh who didn't want to give his name, says he was also regularly beaten and slashed with knives. He corroborated Mullah's account and says the family's dogs were treated considerably better than the staff.

Mullah was forced to watch as the dogs ate and she was left to go hungry, he said.

It seems to sum up how the workers at the beachside complex were viewed by the Gadhafi family.

This is definitely beyond the Queen of Mean, Leona Helmsley, who was a darling of Robin Leach and his unctuous program Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

The problem with a society where a few are fabulously weathy and many are dirt poor is that the rich become unhinged. They develop delusions of grandeur and think they deserve what they have and turn ugly and mean toward those who are not so "blessed" with the goodies of life. This is a sickness.

Sadly, America has fallen to this illness and is still running a fever. I hoped that with the election of Barack Obama the fever would break, but it hasn't. I know it must and will some day. I wish it were sooner rather than later. But for now, the disease is still running wild in the soul of America.

From the US, a "Strategic" Picture of Canada

Here are some bits from a publication in the US talking about the strategic position of the US, its neighbors, and the world. Here I'll pick out the Canadian references. This is all very well understood in Canada but most Americans really don't know:

Canada’s maritime transport zones are far superior to those of Mexico but pale in comparison to those of the United States. Its first, the Great Lakes, not only requires engineering but is shared with the United States. The second, the St. Lawrence Seaway, is a solid option (again with sufficient engineering), but it services a region too cold to develop many dense population centers. None of Canada boasts naturally navigable rivers, often making it more attractive for Canada’s provinces — in particular the prairie provinces and British Columbia — to integrate with the United States, where transport is cheaper, the climate supports a larger population and markets are more readily accessible. Additionally, the Canadian Shield greatly limits development opportunities. This vast region — which covers more than half of Canada’s landmass and starkly separates Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto and the prairie provinces — consists of a rocky, broken landscape perfect for canoeing and backpacking but unsuitable for agriculture or habitation.

...

In the north, the Great Lakes are obviously an ideal break point in the middle of the border region, but the specific location of the line along the rest of the border is largely irrelevant. East of the lakes, low mountains and thick forests dominate the landscape — not the sort of terrain to generate a power that could challenge the U.S. East Coast. The border here could theoretically lie anywhere between the St. Lawrence Seaway and Massachusetts without compromising the American population centers on the East Coast (although, of course, the farther north the line is the more secure the East Coast will be). West of the lakes is flat prairie that can be easily crossed, but the land is too cold and often too dry, and, like the east, it cannot support a large population. So long as the border lies north of the bulk of the Missouri River’s expansive watershed, the border’s specific location is somewhat academic, and it becomes even more so when one reaches the Rockies.

On the far western end of the U.S.-Canada border is the only location where there could be some border friction. The entrance to Puget Sound — one of the world’s best natural harbors — is commanded by Vancouver Island. Most of the former is United States territory, but the latter is Canadian — in fact, the capital of British Columbia, Victoria, sits on the southern tip of that strategic island for precisely that reason. However, the fact that British Columbia is more than 3,000 kilometers from the Toronto region and that there is a 12:1 population imbalance between British Columbia and the American West Coast largely eliminates the possibility of Canadian territorial aggression.

...

The first land threat to the young United States was in essence the second phase of the Revolutionary War — a rematch between the British Empire and the young United States in the War of 1812. That the British navy could outmatch anything the Americans could float was obvious, and the naval blockade was crushing to an economy dependent upon coastal traffic. Geopolitically, the most critical part of the war was the participation of semi-independent British Canada. It wasn’t so much Canadian participation in any specific battle of the war (although Canadian troops did play a leading role in the sacking of Washington in August 1814) as it was that Canadian forces, unlike the British, did not have a supply line that stretched across the Atlantic. They were already in North America and, as such, constituted a direct physical threat to the existence of the United States.

Canada lacked many of the United States’ natural advantages even before the Americans were able to acquire the Louisiana Territory. First and most obvious, Canada is far enough north that its climate is far harsher than that of the United States, with all of the negative complications one would expect for population, agriculture and infrastructure. What few rivers Canada has neither interconnect nor remain usable year round. While the Great Lakes do not typically freeze, some of the river connections between them do. Most of these river connections also have rapids and falls, greatly limiting their utility as a transport network. Canada has made them more usable via grand canal projects, but the country’s low population and difficult climate greatly constrain its ability to generate capital locally. Every infrastructure project comes at a great opportunity cost, such a high cost that the St. Lawrence Seaway — a series of locks that link the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and allow full ocean access — was not completed until 1959.

Canada is also greatly challenged by geography. The maritime provinces — particularly Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island — are disconnected from the Canadian landmass and unable to capitalize on what geographic blessings the rest of the country enjoys. They lack even the option of integrating south with the Americans and so are perennially poor and lightly populated compared to the rest of the country. Even in the modern day, what population centers Canada does have are geographically sequestered from one another by the Canadian Shield and the Rocky Mountains.

As time advanced, none of Canada’s geographic weaknesses worked themselves out. Even the western provinces — British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba — are linked to Canada’s core by only a single transport corridor that snakes 1,500 kilometers through the emptiness of western and central Ontario north of Lake Superior. All four provinces have been forced by geography and necessity to be more economically integrated with their southern neighbors than with their fellow Canadian provinces.

Such challenges to unity and development went from being inconvenient and expensive to downright dangerous when the British ended their involvement in the War of 1812 in February 1815. The British were exhausted from the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and, with the French Empire having essentially imploded, were more interested in reshaping the European balance of power than re-engaging the Americans in distant North America. For their part, the Americans were mobilized, angry and — remembering vividly the Canadian/British sacking of Washington — mulling revenge. This left a geographically and culturally fractured Canada dreading a long-term, solitary confrontation with a hostile and strengthening local power. During the following decades, the Canadians had little choice but to downgrade their ties to the increasingly disinterested British Empire, adopt political neutrality vis-a-vis Washington, and begin formal economic integration with the United States. Any other choice would have put the Canadians on the path to another war with the Americans (this time likely without the British), and that war could have had only one outcome.

With its northern border secured, the Americans set about excising as much other extra-hemispheric influence from North America as possible.

...

Just as the American plan for dealing with Canada was shaped by Canada’s geographic weakness, Washington’s efforts to first shield against and ultimately take over parts of Mexico were shaped by Mexico’s geographic shortcomings.

The author doesn't dwell on it, but US-Canada relations have been one-sided. The US demands and Canada/Britain compromises, as for example, by giving the US most of what it wanted with the Oregon compromise:

• Originally this territory was part of the vast HBC (Hudson Bay Company) empire of fur trapping. From Wikipedia:
  

  Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, the HBC controlled nearly all trading operations in the Pacific Northwest, based out of the company headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. Although authority over the region was nominally shared by the United States and Britain through the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, company policy, enforced via Chief Factor John McLoughlin of the company's Columbia District, was to discourage U.S. settlement of the territory. The company's effective monopoly on trade virtually forbade any settlement in the region. It established Fort Boise in 1834 (in present-day southwestern Idaho) to compete with the American Fort Hall, 483 km (300 miles) to the east. In 1837, it purchased Fort Hall, also along the route of the Oregon Trail, where the outpost director displayed the abandoned wagons of discouraged settlers to those seeking to move west along the trail.
  
  ...
  
  During the 1820s and 1830s, HBC trappers were deeply involved in the early exploration and development of Northern California. Company trapping brigades were sent south from Fort Vancouver, along what became known as the Siskiyou Trail, into Northern California as far south as the San Francisco Bay Area. These trapping brigades in Northern California faced serious risks, and were often the first to explore relatively uncharted territory.
  



• This early foothold was simply ignored when the 1846 Oregon "compromise" was settled. Initially the US wanted to take everything up to the parallel 54°40′ north, but was bargained into "only" taking the Oregon and Washington state territories.

Most Americans are treated to a triumphalist history, the infamous Manifest Destiny, which had God giving this land to the deserving Americans. The above "strategic" discussion of America is a healthy antidote to that nonsense. The US was hewn out of its neighbors by a designing, grasping, and ambitious political class in Washington DC. Read the whole document to see how the US treated Canada, Mexico, Spain, Hawaii, and the rest of the world.

But even this isn't the whole story. It ignores the outrages of suppressing democracy in the Philipines, the gunboat diplomacy in China, the outrageous "United Fruit" diplomacy in Central and Latin America, and the budding "new Rome" where the US, as the sole Colossus standing after WWII, built a vast empire of military bases around the world and brought war to many, many countries all cynically in the name of "democracy" or of "helping an ally". Think of US policies in South America, and a good example is how the US killed the legally elected president of Chile, Salvator Allende. Such a friendly gesture!

The Death of the "Live Free or Die" America

Funny. Americans claim to hate big government. They rage at Washington. They elect right wing conservative governors, and what happens. The state governments become "big brother" and crush the little people.

Here's an example from Gov. Swartzenegger's California:



I love the quote from the video at 1:40 where the state government tells him:

You can't live here. You can keep the land, but won't be allowed to live on it.

So much for "property rights". The above is a lot like the famous quote by Anatole France on the glory of French law:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

At 5:00 into the video, the real villain is named as Mike Antonovich, Republican head of the Board of Supervisors for Los Angeles county.

Why do Americans vote in right wing governors (and county supervisors) who trample on their rights? Why do Americans mouth a "love of freedom" and allow right wing governments to trample on their rights? Why don't Americans understand that a left wing government would actually protect their rights rather than the property rights of the rich and powerful?

The State of the Republican Party

Here is a bit of a post from Robert Paul Wolff blog The Philosopher's Stone that summarizes the current state of the Republican party in the US:

For those who missed it, Huntsman published a Tweet defending the reality of global warming and the truth of evolution, and since then he has been attacking all of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination as fringe characters with zero connection with reality. The common wisdom is that he has lost his mind and doesn't want the nomination. My guess is that that is all wrong. There is a fragment of the Republican Party [maybe 30%, I don't know] that is still in touch with reality, and he is playing for that group. I desperately don't want the Republicans to win the presidency [whatever Chris says], but I am genuinely frightened by what has happened in the Republican Party. I know what happened in Germany in the mid-thirties. The rise of a large, noisy, angry, bigoted, crazy rightwing political movement may be good electoral politics for the Democrats in the short run, but it is genuinely dangerous. If Hunstman's statements can start to change the public discourse, that is all to the good. We really do not need a rise of fascism in this country. We have gone far enough down that road already, and the weakness of the underlying economy will create the material conditions for a fascist party for some time to come.

His worries that the US can go down the path of Germany in the 1930s is my worry. Everybody I know says "that can never happen". But if you had asked Germans in the late 1920s they would have told you that their democracy would disappear and that a madman would lead them into a hopeless world war and would enforce genocide that would kill millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, socialsts, and handicapped they would have told you that it could never happen to a "civilized" country like Germany. Sadly it could and did. And it can happen in America as well.

Understanding Unemployment in the US

Here is a bit from an interesting article by Robert J. Gordon in the economics journal Vox:

The US is missing millions of jobs. This column argues that the total is 10.4 million. It claims that 3 million of these can be traced to the weakened bargaining position of labour and the growing assertiveness of management in slashing costs to maintain share prices. Moreover, this employment gap is not shrinking because of the ‘double hangover’ effect—an excess housing supply and besieged consumers unwilling to spend.

High and persistent unemployment in the US has emerged as one of the most important macroeconomic legacies of the 2007–09 world economic crisis. While the decline of business activity in the US was no larger than in Europe, the US is an outlier in its outsized response of the unemployment rate to its decline in output (IMF 2011).

Here we quantify the shortfall of US employment—some 10.4 million missing jobs—and ask: Why did the number of jobs decline so much and why has it recovered so little? Two sets of causes stand out.

First, there has been a changing balance of economic power in the US between management and labour in the past two decades that has led to more aggressive firing of workers when business profits head south.
Second, the large negative output gap (actual real GDP below trend or potential) is not shrinking, due to the “double hangover” persisting in the aftermath of the housing bubble.

By explaining why the recovery of aggregate demand has been so weak, we provide an understanding of the refusal of the large negative output gap to shrink—a refusal shared by its twin, the employment gap.

Go read the whole article to get all the details.

The message Gordon has for US workers is pretty gloomy:

When the economy begins to sink—like the Titanic after the iceberg struck—firms begin to cut costs any way they can; tossing employees overboard is the most direct way. For every worker tossed overboard in a sinking economy prior to 1986, about 1.5 are now tossed overboard. Why are firms so much more aggressive in cutting employment costs? My “disposable worker hypothesis” (Gordon 2010) attributes this shift of behaviour to a complementary set of factors that amounts to “workers are weak and management is strong.” The weakened bargaining position of workers is explained by the same set of four factors that underlie higher inequality among the bottom 90% of the American income distribution since the 1970s—weaker unions, a lower real minimum wage, competition from imports, and competition from low-skilled immigrants.

Here is his accounting for the loss of 11.88 million jobs:

• The shortfall of consumer-services spending is the largest subcomponent; it translates into 3.59 million missing jobs.


• Next come the 2.17 million lost jobs in residential construction (on top of those lost between 2006:Q1 and 2007:Q4),


• The 1.76 million in nonresidential structures,


• 1.65 million in consumer durables,


• 1.47 million in state and local government, and


• 1.38 million in equipment and software.

What continues to astound me is the absolute ignorance inside the Obama administration about the economic situation. I can understand the abysmal ignorance of the Republicans. They are anti-science religious fanatics who think God created the universe -- all 92 billion light years in diameter -- in just a few days. It makes sense that they are complete ignoramuses about economics.

The American people deserve better leadership. It is as if the US decided to field an Olympic basketball team and selected players among a boys high school baseball team and chose an art teacher to be "the coach". Mr. Obama -- call me pretty, call me divine, call me artful -- just doesn't have what it takes to deal with the real world problem of getting the US back to economic health.