Let’s play a little game of connect the dots.  So there is some sort of fervor about letting Bush’s tax cuts to the wealthy expire.  It will kill jobs, ruin the economy, destroy our future!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Ok, let’s think about this for a minute.

CEA Chair Austan Goolsbee Explains the Tax Cut Fight

Wealth has been redistributed to those that already have money.

Income Remained Highly Concentrated at the Top

So, what are the wealthy doing with all these tax cuts?  Sitting on them like a golden egg.

$1 Trillion in Reserves, But Not Hiring

So let me get this straight.  We should take money from the government that could be used to provide jobs fixing the broken infrastructure in the US (some may have forgotten that a bridge just fucking fell down in Minneapolis).  This money should then be given to wealthy people who already have billions, but will not create jobs because the economy is too sluggish.  But the economy is sluggish because people don’t have jobs and can’t buy anything. 

Perfect.  I totally understand.  The wealthy have figured out a way, not only to be recession proof, but also fuck us when we're down.  What is even hard to stomach is how much some folks are eager to gobble up this shit sandwich by trying to prevent the wealthy from paying their fair share.

It's the End of the World As We Know It

And I do not feel fine.  It is a strange, sad period in our history.  Oh, how many times has that been uttered.  I cannot help but feel the resonance from history, yet feel a sense of newness to the bizarre behavior we are witnessing.

Let me just start with the notion of change.  We recently elected a president in the U.S. on the platform of change with a stolen slogan, Si Se Puede.  Or for the xenophobes, yes we can.  A mere two years later, I hear the shouts of "throw all the bastards out," bastards meaning incumbents.  Since we have not recovered from the worst recession since the Great Depression in less than two years, we need to get rid of incumbents in favor of people who are associated with the economic catastrophe in the first place.  Okay, so let me get this straight.  Cutthroat conservatives threw us into two wars, stripped us of our wages and benefits, deregulated the economy, plunged us into recession, but they are just the change we need because our economy should have already recovered from the colossal ass-fucking at the hands of the wealthy.  Isn't the ass-fucking and economic meltdown the reason you rejected these assholes in the first place?

Because the public has such an incredibly short memory and little understanding of the world around them, they are gladly eating a juicy shit sandwich.  On an intellectual level, I understand this process.  The people who own the media tend to side with those that ass-fuck the rest of us out of our hard earned cash.  They tend to present us with simple messages of hate, fear and cataclysm.  Since the problems are simple (immigrants), so are the solutions (wall).  This gives the public easily definable enemies to be conquered with swift action.

Unfortunately, I cannot stomach the fact that so many people are so easily manipulated.  Not only manipulated, but outright hostile to rational discussion that would help them understand the issues.  I find that even friends and family feel perfectly justified, if not obligated, to send me the most outrageous, factually inaccurate, misguided attacks on some person or issue.  When I, or others, respond with factual information, not even in a confrontational tone, people explode in a rage of righteous indignation that you have somehow questioned their intelligence.  YOU are the offender for correcting their error, while they are simply the messenger of bad news.  But, when you return the favor and send out information, you are perceived as pushing an agenda and invading someone's private space.

One thing I cannot pinpoint is the origin of these problems because they cross age, income, and sometimes educational lines.  Young people who are subject to increasingly appalling secondary education seem no more susceptible than adults with better educations.  Wealthy as well as working class folks gobble this shit up with a gusto I cannot contemplate.  It is truly sad to watch.

What is even more disturbing to me is that these hostile feelings tend to be directed between two groups of people that are barely distinguishable from each other, especially when it comes to economic and foreign policy.  The public is up in arms about one party or another, but has very little understanding that they are choosing between a nectarine and a peach.  The fact that these small distinctions can raise so much fervor among the population indicates just how pitifully uninformed people really are.

I am at a loss.

Where is Our History? 11-9-2002

  This may be a bit late, but this is my reaction a year after 9-11 - the 9-11 that the US knows, not Latin America which is when Salvador Allede was assassinated in a US aided coup.

    I realize that the US public is still in a state of shock after experiencing the most dramatic attack on US soil.  Many people are rallying together to support each other after this event.  Although I too see a need for people to act collectively, there is something fundamentally missing: a knowledge and sense of history.  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”  (George Santayana in Lowen 1999:443).  At this time, there are many calls to return to the teaching and ethics of our founding fathers.  Intertwined with this nostalgia is a defense of the inclusion of religious sentiment in political rhetoric and prose.
    It comes as no surprise to me that people are coming forward to defend the use of “god” in the pledge of allegiance at a time when our civil liberties have come under serious assault.  The actual words “under god” were added at the height of the Cold War during one of the worst periods of civil rights abuses and repression of civil liberties in US history.  Even the content and actual history surrounding the founding documents is mythologized to the point of grievous error.
    The use of religion in the founding documents is not only sparse, the use religion is expressly forbidden in certain clauses of the Constitution.  Within the Declaration of Independence, god is only mentioned after the “Laws of Nature” and specifically as “Nature’s God.”  In the Constitution, the word “god” or “creator” is not mentioned, and the separation of church and state is more firmly established than in the initial Declaration of Independence.  “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”  Legal argument could be made that the use of the pledge of allegiance in public schools violates the actual intent of the authors of the Constitution with respect to the separation of religion and the state.
    What is included in the Constitution is a number of clauses ranging from who is included as a person to the regulation of runaway slaves.  The Constitution firmly upholds slavery and finds it important enough to include a clause spelling out the necessity for slaves to be returned to their owners, “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”  Native Americans, slaves and women are all denied rights to participate in the Republican form of government that was established.  Slaves were not even considered whole persons, but “three fifths” of a person.  “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”  In all, slaves, indentured servants, women, and men without property were not represented in the Constitution (Zinn 1980:90).  Despite the fact that many Native Americans lived in settled communities, they were also excluded from protection under the Constitution.  The Iroqouis confederacy has been argued to influence the organization of the US government, and the Cherokee had towns and later constructed schools, written language and a representative form of government.
    The return to the mythical past when religion and morality supposedly ruled the day is the only safe refuge for those who endeavor to bury their own past to justify their current actions.  At this time, the Bush administration is fumbling for reason after reason to escalate the military campaign against Iraq, lest we remember that we have yet to accomplish our objective in the last war.  Osama who?  Our history is replete with phony justifications for acts of war and crimes against humanity.  The war in Vietnam was escalated over the supposed “Battle of Tonkin Bay” which never occurred.  Justification for the invasion of Iraq was based on reports of Iraqi soldiers invading a hospital and destroying incubators and killing babies.  The reports turned out to be false, made by a relative of Kuwaiti leaders and disseminated by a public relations firm associated with the Bush family. 
    Each anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brings with it justifications for the bombing and the absolute falsehood that those actions saved US lives.  The Japanese were ready to surrender under the condition that the Emperor remain as a figure in Japanese government.  The US government refused this condition and demanded “unconditional” surrender (Zinn 1980:414).  The targets selected were not military targets, but cities that had remained relatively untouched by previous bombing campaigns.  They were selected in order to test the effectiveness of atomic warheads on areas uncontaminated by prior bombing runs.  After the atomic bombs had been dropped, the US agreed to the demands made by the Japanese prior to the bombing.  Hopefully, you can see the similar pattern of increasing unreasonable demands each time Hussein agrees to US ultimatums.  These are attempts to ramp up a war, for purely selfish political reasons, that has not stopped since the bombing of Iraq began in 1991.  There have even been discussions about the Bush administration’s public relations campaign to start a war with Iraq.  This summer, the media was contemplating what the Bush administration was going to do because it appeared that public sentiment against Iraq had peaked before they were ready to go to war.  In any other country under any other circumstance, this discussion would sound surreal.  War is not something that should have to be marketed like the next manifestation of the Barbie doll, but in the US, marketing for war has become a serious business.
    In the war on Afghanistan, the media and press within the US have been admonished to ensure they discuss the victims of September 11th whenever civilian casualties in Afghanistan are mentioned (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1031-02.htm).  A compliant media censors itself to ensure that it provides “context” and “balance.”  This “context” and “balance” is thoroughly one-sided and without a shred of historical foundation.  Why would anyone choose the US over another country like Sweden, Canada or Denmark?  The answer lies in our own history of aggression, and this is not an attempt to “blame” the US for the attack as so assiduously argued by people attempting to sever dissent.
    Over ten years ago, one nation-the US, without UN backing and in violation of international agreements, invaded Panama to oust its CIA bankrolled leader.  In the assault on this sovereign country to retrieve this one person, close to 2,000 civilians were killed by gunfire and the deliberate fire-bombing of a civilian neighborhood.  In the US, very little outrage developed from this brutal assault mainly because the media parroted the line of the US government and focused little attention on the civilian casualties.  The loss of civilian life in this case and September 11th are comparable, but the public outcry could not have been more different.  You see, if someone attacks the US, we are sure to give “context” to the civilian deaths, but if the US kills 2,000 Panamanian civilians to remove their own CIA bankrolled drug lord gone bad, the public is denied that context.  For context, see the movie The Panama Deception.
    The bombing in Afghanistan follows a very similar pattern.  Very few people in the US could give you even the briefest of history into this besieged region.  Over time, the US has been involved in the struggles and civil war that has plagued Afghanistan.  Please do yourself a favor and dig into the ties between the US, the Mujahadeen and the eventual rise of the Taliban.  For the sake of brevity, I will mention one critical note.  Less than a year prior to the attacks of September 11, the Bush administration allocated $43 million dollars to the Taliban regime: the very same regime that would be rightly vilified for their human rights abuses, treatment of women and anti-democratic society (http://www.robertscheer.com/1_natcolumn/01_columns/052201.htm).  If the US intelligence community was up to date on the activities of the Taliban, why develop such a cosy relationship with them?  The answer lies in the US foreign policy that has been plagued by the “blowback” from US trained and backed dictators and terrorists like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega (See <A HREF="http://msnbc.com/news/190144.asp?cp1=1">this MSNBC article by Michael Moran</A>).  Our desire to control economic resources around the globe through military occupation, covert operations and political manipulations creates the very political environment for terrorist activity.  For example, we routinely fund and support other countries’ candidates, as in Nicaragua, despite the fact that such practices are illegal in the US.  In fact, many of the terrorists that we eventually have to track down have been trained by US military and government operatives.
    We pass judgement on countries and cultures every day when we live in the most powerful nation in the world, yet we lag behind nearly all industrialized nations in the most important indicators: literacy, access to health care, hours worked, level of pay, income and wealth inequality, infant mortality and education.  We have used the rhetoric of freedom to beat down any attempt to make this nation more free and prosperous for its citizens.  Because of monied interests, we are mired in a two-party system where other countries have more representative parliamentary forms of government.  We see how effective and “democratic” the Electoral College has been, time and time again.  The US is the only industrialized nation that has successfully kept affordable, accessible health care out of the reach of the vast majority of its citizens.  Prisons compete, rather well in fact, with schools for funding, and the US ranks near the top of industrialized nations in the percentage of citizens it holds in prison.  The US government and corporate leaders have used repression and passed legislation to crush labor movements for better working conditions.  European nations enjoy more time off and have higher wages than US workers could ever dream of given the present state of conditions.
    The foreign policy of the US and the suggestion that students repeat the pledge of allegiance despite their religious background, personal feelings and civil rights may seem quite unrelated, but they are both rooted in a fundamental ignorance of US and world history.  How free would you feel in a country that made your children dedicate their allegiance under Budda?  You would be incensed, outraged and decry the backwardness of a country that forces one religion on its citizens.  It is not a “right” or a “freedom” to force your will upon other citizens in order to satisfy your sense of self-righteousness.  Requiring, or even allowing, the pledge of allegiance in an attempt to bring god back into our political realm is not only a romantic mythology and historically inaccurate, it is an affront to the rights of other citizens to worship the religion of their choice or to not worship at all.  People can say that not everyone would be required to recite the pledge, but given the level of hysteria, xenophobia and racial intolerance, what “choice” does a student have?  They do not. 
    Religious freedom and the separation of church and state are but just part of the issue.  Oaths of allegiance and pledges are typically brought out by governments and organizations standing on weak moral ground during times when they need to indoctrinate people and ensure support for their unethical actions.  Because the US population does not have access to accurate information either through a solid grounding in history or an informative media, it too does not have a “choice” and blindly follows the propaganda pumped out of the White House and corporate boardrooms.  When will US citizens be shaken from their ignorance-induced trance to see the full scope of their actions?  When will the simple solution of carpet bombing no longer be the answer to the complex problems of the world economy and political landscape?  When will US citizens care about the innocent victims (and not just the innocent victims on “our” side) of conflicts between global political and economic leaders?  You can be certain it will not come before they learn their history!

A Few Thoughts: July 10, 2003

Here’s a few thoughts for you.  Ain’t life a bitch.  Just when you think you’ve been kicked to the dirt you find yourself at the edge of a cliff.  Pain and misery is so relative.  I’ve had days where it’s hard to find two pennies to rub together, but I can write a credit card check to put off the pain for some other day.  I see people who are really hurting, and it tends to make me both angry and guilty at the same time.  I don’t have real problems, but I swear some days just trying to open the refrigerator without some major catastrophe is like trying to ass fuck the pope.  Why?  Why is it that such little things seem like such mountainous problems.  The straw that broke the camel’s back is the analogy that rings true for so many people that live in such a pressured society.  Sure, spilled milk is no reason to fly off the handle, but what preceded the tipped glass?  Just like there are no singular causes in society, there is an environment in which all actions/experiences are embedded.  Some people, and I am one of them, that piles all of the decades of injustice into my emotional baggage to savor it for some future point.  Thus, when the fourteenth infinitesimal assault on my patience occurs, I tend to top it off with the context that it is in.  There are so many examples that I can think of where some simple shit has sent me over the top.  For some strange reason, I used to tie football to global struggles between good and evil.  Each game was a contest between people that latched themselves to the flavor of the week and the poor sons-a-bitches like myself that were pathetic enough to maintain allegiance to our chosen team.  This is silly and innocuous, but with a number of cheap beers in you, it’s easy to find importance in such strange places.  Shallow fuckers tend to move from successful team to successful team, and funding/prestige had a lot to do with the ability to bring teams together (since the salary cap, things have evened up, but now, underdogs (Packers - Rams) are scorned the year after winning the superbowl).  On a more serious side, I find the lack of money a general problem, a constant malaise that is heightened at different points in time.  I’ve always been poor, not hungry or homeless and I have never wanted for necessities.  Right now, I am damn sick and tired of living check to check to credit card check.  It’s been years since I have been able to afford an enclosed mode of individualized transportation.   Simple fucking things like meeting someone or picking up something at the store become a complete fucking adventure.  Once, I gave a student a ride on my motorcycle in the pouring rain on a dark country road to see Howard Zinn speak at a college 45 miles away.  We both emptied our boots when we got back.  Transportation is one thing that is entirely embedded within the societal context of compensation and community.  Given the sad state of public transportation in the US, people without funds are forced to do with the pathetic state of domestic personal transportation.  If you have to get somewhere, you are more than likely “nickle and dimed” to death by the fuckin’ cheap piece of shit we are forced to talk nice to just to get the damn thing to start on a blustery day.  Thus, when we hop in our sheet metal and plastic death traps and the fuckin thing craps out in the middle of nowhere, it is not just the fact that the planned obsolescence of the alternator left us freezing our fucking knuckles off gripping 5 degree below tools as we wrestle the sad-ass joke for planned engineering off out of cavity meant to fit a gnat’s ass.  It is the goddamn entirety of poverty living that doesn’t allow some poor son-of-a-bitch like myself to afford a decent (if not “foreign”) car.  And I am a white-collar desk jockey living off the public teet.  I really do not even have to work to earn what little I get.

But we must all carry our burdens.  Pain is relative.  We all feel like what we are experiencing is worse than most.  We delude ourselves in order to give meaning to our pain.  In some ways, pain becomes a badge of honor - we overcame some hurdle that no one else has experienced.  I’ve gotten to the point where not only do I seek out persecution, but I begin to define the actions of others as a direct assault.  Pain and misery are easy emotions to grab ahold of in dark times.  We are all caught in the everyday.  I have fought for what I have thought were the oppressed, because I was there at the time.  I fought tooth and nail to make things better, but once I left, it was as if I was never there.  Not only do people not recognize your contribution, they detest your input in the process.  The wisdom of years of experience not only goes unused, but they are openly contradicted.  The only real conciliation is that only when they act as I had instructed does the “organization” improve, but it still does not mean that they listen, or act in ways that I see as transparent or democratic.  Sometimes, I wonder if the fucking ass-slepping cock-suckers that “own” this fucking planet feel the same way.  I know that tree-huggers, activists, informed people and the light of day are a fucking pain in the ass for these people, but how much are they really bothered?  In the bygone era, they had the Pinkerton’s to enforce their misery.  Now, they hire professional armies if the complete domination of the press is ineffective.  Once a friend of mine had told me about a dinner with a number of wealthy elites.  He commented that they were nice people, and I replied that they can afford to be nice.  I am fairly unpleasant to be around a good chunk of the time because I am seriously disturbed by the way the world is.  I can be disagreeable because I just spent the last 72 hours attempting to install the latest version of some fuckin’ bloated pig’s software on my computer.  Sure, computers are complex systems, but for fuck’s sake, stop fucking “revolutionizing” the fucking sector every six months.

Ahh, what petty fucking crap.  Get over it.  I totally agree.  I hate being weak and not dealing with the issues that confront you, but sometimes, the mountain of crap that assails people makes the simplest problems the easiest ones to both bitch about and deal with.  What the fuck can any of us do about the sad state of the economy?  Unemployment, underemployment and shitty fucking pay are out of our control to a large degree.  There are the jackasses that argue we should invest in our education and skills to “earn” better wages and secure better employment.  What this ignores is the fact that the cocksuckers running the show have thrown us out on the street in order to cut inflation, boost stockholder confidence or “cool” the economy.  Capitalism cannot tolerate 100% employment, so don’t tell me poverty and unemployment are the fault of the victims of this inhuman system.

What this fucking system breeds is people that have the life sucked out of them and others that are sick and tired.  The problems that we are facing now are when the two come together - pissed off suicidal mother fuckers.  Ain’t nothin’ as dangerous as someone who is pissed off, but doesn’t give a fuck.  Bureaucracy generally and capitalism more specifically breeds this kind of feeling.  By taking away people’s ability to provide for themselves, it breeds despair, but the constant insult of opulent wealth, and intentional degradation of the working people generates animosity.  What is fairly interesting, but not surprising, is the number of well-off or extremely wealthy individuals who profit from these feelings.  They chatter on about the sacrifices of the working class, while at the same time they brutally enforce their sick caste privilege.

My graduate program has gradually descended.  It has been a fairly interesting process.  I was successful for a time in fighting for the rights of, what I thought were, the oppressed.  My upward struggle culminated in fighting off a university attack on worker health care.  Soon after, my downward spiral began.  The union fell into inept hands, the parent organization so disorganized it used me as a scapegoat, and an attempt to support a fellow grad failed because of the bureaucratic inertia of the university and the ignorance of union officials.  The utter unfathomable quagmire of departmental politics surrounding graduate student issues was only exacerbated by the comprehensive exam delay created by my own lack of clarity and strength to determine its direction.  I have finally thrown up my hands.  I could give a shit less what happens from this point on.  Academia is absolute crap from the inside out.  The university portends to be an institute of higher learning, but succumbs to the ignorance and racism of its contributing plebiscite, leading to a facility relegated to its position as a glorified technical school.  Learning is the unintended if ever achieved consequence of a system oriented around the continued access of funding both for the university as a whole, and its constituent parts.

I recall a story, its origin lost in the fog, of a psychology experiment where the survival capacity of rats was observed.  For one group, the rats were held tightly until they stopped struggling against the researcher’s grip.  They were then tossed into a pool where they were allow to swim futilely until they drowned.  The second group of rats was simply tossed into the pool without the prior iron grip of the researcher.  Not surprisingly enough, the rats that were constrained stopped swimming and drowned much sooner than their counterparts.

University education, and capitalist life process in general, is the process of suffocating people until they relinquish themselves to their fate.  It is much better to have docile, fatalistic drones than struggling serfs who may live long enough to unseat the king.  Their strategy has to this point proved quite effective.  We only have to look so far as the music industry to see how many dreamers and rebels who have succumb to the despair of success and failure against society and the music establishment.  In the world of public protest, the lack of despair is met with a harsh response.  Within the Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton were all murdered for attempting to ameliorate the ills of capitalist society.  Malcolm was killed for offering an alternative that stepped outside of the bounds.  Martin lost his life when his dream began to look as though it may become a reality. Fred simply was killed for providing kids with the nutrition they needed to be an active part of the pathetically inadequate education system.  God forbid your attempt to swim a little longer.  If you don’t put a gun to your own head, the US government, or it some righteous fuck, will gladly do it for you.

Building a Nation of Know-Nothings
This is something that I knew already.  While people have always been subject to propaganda, the sheer amount of misinformation in the media is staggering.  Try looking up simple information and you are inevitably directed to an incredibly unreliable source, wikipedia.  Unfortunately, the media probably fairs worse, depending on the source and the issue, and the rest of the internet is littered with garbage.  People make voting decisions on fabricated chain emails that would make any knowledgeable person cringe.  People lack fundamental knowledge of history and how the economy works.  They lack the skills to discriminate between good and bad bits of information.

All of this misinformation, ignorance and lack of skills does not bode well for the future.  People are chasing the phantoms of terrorists, liberals, immigrants, etc. while their livelihoods are stolen away from them - from the very people that they support.  It is a sick play to watch, even sicker when you try to talk to someone who is convinced they are right, but have no idea what they are talking about.

Fifteen years ago I had a conversation with someone who felt that unemployment was due to laziness.  So, I asked him, "Do you think unemployment fluctuates precisely with the number of lazy people in the United States?"  He replied, "Yes, I do."  I think my skull nearly ruptured from the sheer stupidity.  Such a baseless form of ignorance is hard to explain, let alone stomach in the most powerful economic nation in the world.  You think we have better economics teachers than this!  But, alas, it is not about the quality of our economics teachers but a benign neglect that feeds this ignorance.

There are no institutes or conspiracies trying to ensure the public's ignorance, but conveniently, the wealthy's strategy of enriching themselves by impoverishing the public coffers has just that effect.  Education has decidedly slipped in the United States, and the media has filled the gap.  In the gaping hole that is what people should know about our history, the media (owned by the very wealthiest in our society) flushes the fabricated garbage of corporate minds to ensure that the public remains confused and impotent as a political force.

The idea that an Islamic cultural center is a threat to democracy, the questioning of the president's birth certificate, believing that the current budget crisis arose in the Obama administration, disputing the veracity of climate change, and thinking Saddam Hussein was working with Al-Qaeda are all laughable ideas, but, apparently, worthy of discussion and debate in our society.

What makes this all so truly sad is that there is a study by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler called "When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions" that suggests that people who are strong ideologues cling more tightly to misinformation.  In other words, when you give closed-minded people good information, they will cling more tightly to their misinformation.

This has dire implications.  The misinformation that people receive through the media and a poor education system becomes entrenched, and strengthened, when people encounter more accurate information.  In this way, people actually get dumber because they reject the good information and cling more tightly to their misinformation.  The question is, "can we overcome such incredible odds to create a better society?"