The American Dream

Free Speech with attentive listeners. Are you dreaming?

Many Americans still dream of an egalitarian American society in which  education and/ or hard work somehow guarantee that anyone can climb from the lowest economic rungs of our society to, at the very least, a comfortable, economically secure existence that includes a home and a secure retirement. Is that still a likely outcome?

It's not, and it hasn't been since sometime in the 1970's. Economic statistics show that between 1984 and 2009 America's GNP (Gross National Product) virtually exploded and climbed from $2.75 trillion  to $14.56 Trillion. During that same period the median income of the average American, however, actually fell while  the income of the top 1% - CEOs for example - increased, some economists say, by several thousand percent. It seems that the wealth that was produced by hard work and long hours wasn't shared. It all bubbled up to the top 1% of this country's population, and in fact, most of it ended up in the hands of the .01%. How could this happen?  Here's a clue.

During the same period of time the median net worth of a member of the House of Representatives more than doubled from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, and that doesn't even include home equity in their McMansions. While Main Street got poorer politicians and Wall Street got richer. More than  half the members of Congress are millionaires, some of them many times over. They have little understanding, and apparently little interest, in the plight of those of us who live on Main Street rather than Wall Street. Some of the wealthiest members of Congress represent some of the poorest districts, but that doesn't seem to matter. The Congressmen and women are ignoring the wishes of the majority of the American people anyway. 

Research shows that a Congressperson votes his personal interests first, and the interests of his constituents only if that doesn't interfere with his personal agenda. Black hat Republicans and 'gray' hat Blue Dog Democrats have cooperated to pass a boat load of legislation that benefited them and their wealthy contributors without so much as a thought for their constituents. 

A no better example can be found than the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Originally passed in 1933 Glass-Steagall mandated the separation of commercial and investment banking in order to protect depositors from the danger of speculation and risky investments. It worked fine for fifty years. 

Then in the 1970s there was a new feeling abroad. A well funded campaign began to expand the number of lobbyist and lobbying firms in Washington,  almost all of them working in the interest of Wall Street and the financial industry. In the next twenty or so years the number of lobbyists doubled and the amount of money used to lobby the Congress grew almost 700%. 

At the same time the amount of money necessary to run a successful Congressional political campaign grew rapidly as well. It's generally agreed that to run for the House one needs to have at least $1.5 million dollars - to run for the Senate requires a minimum of $10 million - and the lobbyists have the money. Obama's successful bid for the Presidency was largely funded, despite silly talk about "$5.00 at a time", by Wall Street firms. So it's no surprise that he appointed Wall Street habitues to take charge of the country's economics. And they knew who they owed their good fortune to: Wall Street.

Anyway, to get back to the story, during the heady years of the Reagan Administration the banking industry began lobbying for the repeal of Glass-Steagall. It was holding back the economy, they insisted. Republicans, of course, jumped on board the band wagon, but so did the majority of Democrats under the rubric of "Neoliberalism". 

When the repeal of Glass-Steagall finally came to a vote in the Senate the Republicans voted 52 to 1 to repeal the Act. But, Gentle Reader, so did the Democrats - the millionaire Democrats. Now that the financial industry has used the de-regulation of their industry to engage in some of the most unethical practices seen since the days of the robber barons to bring this America's economy to its' knees in the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, various Democrats are crying "holier than thou" and trying to pin the whole mess on the Republicans, but the record is embarrassingly clear on this. Democrats voted 38 to 5 to repeal Glass-Steagall and the die was cast and economic excess was the order of the day.

And when the traditional poop hit the fan and the housing bubble burst with financial shrapnel flying everywhere, the Democratic Congress and the Democratic President bailed out the banks, the ones who'd caused the mess in the first place, and left Main Street and the middle class to fend for themselves. Oh sure, a few crumbs fell off the political table: extended unemployment, etc. But the Congress, the millionaire Congress, is taking care of it's own.

And, of course, the Supreme Court has now pitched in and declared that corporations are people and have all the rights that you and I have: free speech (unless you want to speak on the Capitol steps, or course), the right to privacy. Yes, corporations have all the rights you and I have. I wonder why they don't also have the same responsibilities. 

What can we do about all this? Maybe nothing. The plutocrats, emboldened by past successes, are already trying to go a little further. Wisconsin's Governor tried to deny workers the right to collective bargaining, Michigan's Governor has given himself the right to ignore elected officials and simply take over any town or city that seems to be having financial difficulties. He's appointing conservators to run these formerly democratically run entities and has declared that he has the right to abbrogate contracts and sell the entities assets without any recourse to a democratic process. 

If we're going to have any chance at all to preserve our democracy and our Republic from these greedy and undemocratic S.O.B.s we need to start working urgently on a couple of things. First, we need to elect truly Progressive Congress people who will pass legislation stating that corporations are most emphatically NOT people. Only people are people. Second, we need to change the way our Constitution is amended. At the moment it's almost impossible to amend the Constitution no matter how outdated some of it's provisions are. Third, we need to do away with the electoral college. It's a dinosaur that is no longer needed. We need to set up a system where the person who gets the most votes gets to be President, or dog catcher, or whatever office is up for grabs. Most votes wins. How's that for a radical concept. And finally, and here I'm really off in lala land, let's work out a way to take big money out of politics. Let's require the radio and television companies, who all operate under license anyway, to give a certain amount of television time to any candidate who collects a certain minimum of signatures supporting his or her candidacy. Or, alternatively, we can do what Norway does ban political advertising of any kind during the actual election period. This would force candidates to actually go and meet their constituents in person. What a concept.

Pie in the Sky, I know. But if we don't do something we'll all be working just to stave off hunger, like about a quarter of our population does right now. 

The alternative to democratic political change - and I've seen this abroad - is blood; blood in the streets. We've come close to this before, but never as close as we are now. 

Who represents your interests. The answer at the moment seems to be, almost “no one”. Democrats, Republicans, all of them seem to operate with the motto: party first, people second. 

Time for a change.

A New Kind of War

A New Kind of War

America is no longer “one Nation …… indivisible”. Our country is divided against itself as it hasn’t been since the Civil War. And leading the Nation we now have a President – elected by an angry minority of voters – who is demonstrably a facile liar, a business cheat, a bully and a racist. How was he elected? How does he retain power. What’s happened to America? It may be that we have fallen before a new strategy of “war”: non-linear war.

The man who invented this new strategy is, in all probability, a Russian politician, the power behind Vladimir Putin’s political throne, named Vladislav Surkov. No one is quite sure because the original author of the strategy of non-linear war is a writer named Nathan Dubovitskaya, but that name is now widely believed to be a pseudonym for Surkov, the power behind Putin's throne.

In its more detailed form this new strategy, varioiusly called "Non-linear War" or "Cyberwar", utilizes all the forces of a nation – cyberwar, military war, insurgent warfare, politics, diplomacy and whatever else is available, to obtain victory by creating a swirling, appearing and disappearing, conflict on a dozen different fronts simultaneously so that the opposition is never sure whether it is being attacked, and if it is, by whom and to what end.

The author, Peter Pomerantsev, describes this new strategy, this new world, as follows:

"In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it's indefinable."

— Peter Pomerantsev, in "Putin's Rasputin", London Review of Books issue of 20 October 2011

It’s a strategy that is based on a realization that in these times strength alone, whether military or political, is not sufficient to achieve the desired goal or victory. This new strategy wins by using confusion and misdirection, a strategy based, as Pomerantsev says, on keeping the opposition “constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable  because it is undefinable”. It’s the strategy of Vladimir Putin, and of Donald Trump.

In running Putin’s election campaign Surkov would do things like sponsor and finance a party opposed to Putin and then, when the new party was successfully launched,  “leak” the information that it had been secretly created by Putin. In the confusion voters found themselves uncertain who was doing what and to whom and Putin won easily.

In the Ukraine confusion reigns. Are the troops fighting in Eastern Ukrain Russin or insurrgents?  Did Russia shoot down the KLM jetliner or did the Ukrainians? What the heck is going on? Who's on first? And all the while a constant campaign of alternately bellicosity and peacemaking keeps the world off balance. This is Non-linear War.

In addition to the title “Non-linear War” this new strategy is also called “Cyberwar” because of its’ sophisticated and strategic use of hackers and trolls and faux news to spread confusion and dissension in the ranks of its’ opposition. Whether or not Donald Trump consciously used, or was even aware of, this new vision of warfare and competition his campaign used it very effectively in America’s last Presidential election. An almost constant barrage of leaked emails, orchestrated troll attacks and faux news reports assisted, we now know, by a large Coterie of Russian hackers, bedeviled and harassed Hillary Clinton’s (and Bernie Sander's) campaign almost from the beginning. It was difficult, almost impossible, for the average voter to find a rational path through the “fake news” and “alternative facts” that were hallmarks of the campaign. The result was an improbable win for one of least qualified candidates, both politically, personally, and intellectually, ever to run for major office. He used it and he's continuing to use it.

Since his inauguration Donald Trump has continued a non-linear assault on the electorate. Is he honoring his campaign pledges or not? Did he even make a particular campaign pledge or not? Is he a populist or an elitist? Is he a Russian puppet? The list goes on and on and the result is confusion and dissension in our increasingly alienated population. Is Trump lying in his attempt to cast doubt on our free press, or are the stories about contact with the Russians really “fake” news from a lying press corps? Why has he attempted to gut the Department of Justice? Is it to conceal his connections to Russia? Or is it because the DOJ is rampant with incompetent investigators and prosecutors. Flip flopping and contradicting himself, Trump allows voters to see whatever they want to see in his constantly changing and amorphous persona.

A confused and divided and angry electorate is turning on each other. But what can we do? We’re like children at a magic show. If you want to know how the trick is REALLY done you have to keep watching the magician’s OTHER hand, not the one he holds up in the air and waves around. The non-linear strategy depends on confusion and, just like the magician, on misdirection. Our nation is not a magic show, and we need to see what is really happening all around us.

As citizens we need to keep alert. We need, to stretch another poor metaphor out of shape, to keep our eye on the ball even when the pitcher is throwing a curve. If we don’t work hard to be informed citizens and vote intelligently we’ll lose our Democracy. Be alert, don't be afraid, take action. Otherwise we’ll simply hand our country over to the Fascists and Dictators and Oligarchs, and that would be a true disaster.

Gun control: as simple as ABC?

When it comes to gun deaths America really is exceptional. Every statistical measure shows that compared, for example, to European countries we Americans kill our fellow citizens, and ourselves , with guns hundreds of times more frequently than any other modern society.
School shootings in which students die at the hands of their disgruntled fellow students are almost a weekly occurrence these days. " going postal" is now part of our vocabulary. But aside from our usual " my thoughts and prayers are with you" too grieving parents and relatives, what are we doing about it? More to the point, what is Congress doing about it. The majority of the people in America according to polls that have been taken want stronger gun laws, better background checks, Etc in Congress does nothing.

Well, what can it do? Can we take military style weapons out of our national environment? Probably not! There would probably be some Bloodshed if we tried, and there's so many of the damn things in circulation that you'd never get them all. So anyone who's peeved because their neighbors dog craps on their lawn can pull out their AR-15 and Massacre 10 or 20 of his neighbors. A student who got turned down for a date to the prom can gun down a bunch of his fellow students. Is it mental health, is it guns, is it the Flying Spaghetti Monster, phases of the Moon? Is there just one kind of motivation for all these extreme murderers? Probably not. If there is a whole bunch of social scientist who been looking for it have not been very successful.

I have a few suggestions that are probably more practicable.

When I was still working I taught a special class in behavior modification tpparents of difficult children: autistic spectrum, intellectually handicapped comma Etc. ( please note, I did not attempt to apply behavior modification to personality disorders. I was only interested in giving parents a tool to deal with specific disruptive behaviors: spinning, head-banging, that sort of thing)

To simplify the theory behind all this I called my class the ABCs of Behavioral Change. "A" stood for antecedent, what preceded the behavior. "B" stood for the behavior itself. "C" was the consequences, what came after the behavior. To change any Behavior one needs to modify the antecedents, the environmental factors that produce the behavior, or the consequences, what came after the behavior. Of course I caught the parents other things too: how to reserve and record Behavior, how to make decisions about what techniques to use Etc, but the important thing for this discussion was the ABCs Theory.

There are few things that we can do to change the antecedents. We can do what Iceland does it make it more difficult to actually obtain a gun: required classes, training, instruction and so on. We can also make having a gun more like having a car. More difficult tests for obtaining a gun license, required gun insurance, and serious and stiffer penalties 4 people to think about trading guns illegally or without satisfying the legal requirements.

It's harder to use external factors to modify the behavior itself. I can now lock my phone in a way that only my fingerprint will unlock it and make it operable. Could we do that with guns? Probably but it would make the guns cost more and so the gun manufacturers won't like that. So let's think about how we can change what comes after the behavior, the consequences.

One obvious consequences is stiffer penalties for people who use their guns illegally, whether they're poaching deer or poaching people. Maybe something like a 10-year penalty for anyone who uses the gun in the commission of a crime, the penalty to be served before the penalty for the actual crime itself begins. We could have stiffer penalties for people caught with an unregistered or illegal gun. How about 5 years? Or how about 2 years of Public Service? Or maybe a stiff fine and the forfeiture of any right to own or operate a gun. You get the point. If you don't modify one of the ABCs nothing is going to change.

One of the last things I taught my parents was that it was better to reinforce the behavior you want then to punish the behavior you don't want. So how about if we have a license fee for owning a gun but then give a rebate if that gun owner doesn't transgress 4, say, five years. In other words a cash rebate? How about rewarding gun owners with free target practice at public ranges? How about allowing responsible gun users to take part in shooting competitions with prizes? There are lots of possibilities.

Would these work? Probably! Behavior modification, despite its bad name, actually does work. And all this time I haven't once mentioned the culture of violence that is perpetuated by our TVs, R movies, even our news coverage.

Will the ABCs work perfectly? Does anything? But most people agree we have to do something and the research is very clear that just putting more guns in the system doesn't help. We have to do something.

In the end we need to change our culture and teach accommodation and communication rather than confrontation and violence as solutions to problems. That will be the really hard part. We have to do something. Statistically we are more in danger from our fellow citizens then we are from angry jihadists and in my humble opinion that's one of the things that's causing us to respond in aggressive ways. 

One Big Union

The Class War in America:
"One Big Union" was one of the slogans of one of the best known labor unions in America, The Industrial Workers of the World. Organized in 1905 in Chicago, the IWW, popularly known as the "Wobblies" was created because of a belief among its' founders that the American Federation of Labor, the AFL, was failing in the struggle of workers against what the initial IWW Industrial Congress called the "employing class."

The IWW's goal, repeated over and over again in it's pamphlets and newsletters and its' music, was to promote solidarity among members of the working class. The song "Solidarity Forever" might even be considered the IWW's anthem. They saw that the AFL's approach, to organize workers by "narrow craft principles", divided workers instead of bringing them together.  They believed that the rights of workers would never be achieved or protected until all workers were united in "One Big Union", an international union bringing together workers from around the world. Their motto - "an injury to one is an injury to all" - captures the spirit of the IWW. (For a more detailed and extensive introduction to the IWW see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World.)

Plutocracy and the Constitution:
The history of the IWW with it's episodes of violent and often murderous suppression by government and semi-government forces like the American Legion is a snapshot of American history. From the very beginning of America there has always been a tension, even an antagonism, between the plutocracy, the wealthy property owners, that governed and the workers who were to be governed.

At the time just before America's independence was declared a serious issue almost scuttled the whole independence movement. A very serious debate broke out over whether those citizens who didn't own property - the workers - should be allowed to have a vote in the new nation. (Women and slaves were not even considered, of course). Eventually the question was settled on very pragmatic grounds. The wealthy landowners, the plutocracy, realized that a Declaration of Independence would lead inevitably to war with England. They also realized that as a class they, the oligarchy, didn't have sufficient numbers to mount an army. The workers, the propertyless, were needed to staff the army that would inevitably be needed. (Not much has changed there in the intervening centuries either).

The point is that there was, and always has been, a tension between the "haves" and the "have nots" in this country. The conflict becomes less obvious in time of war when all citizens are needed in order to create and support a military, and sometimes the "peace" in the class conflict even extends a little beyond the end of hostilities, but eventually the conflict re-emerges, as it has now.

An IWW Demonstration: New York 1914

The IWW opposed WWI, and any war, as the "bosses" business and many Wobblies were tried and convicted under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the war. Some were jailed for up to twenty years; others fled the country, and some were unceremoniously rounded up and shipped abroad by the authorities. The history of the IWW, as part of the history of Unionism in America, is often violent and blood-spattered. IWW leaders were beaten, shot, lynched and jailed for their advocacy of free speech, collective bargaining, and anti-war sentiments. The powers-that-be, the ever present plutocracy in America, tolerates free speech and working class organization only to a point and then it steps in and crushes the protesters. We see a classic example today here in America.

When the Occupy Wall Street movement began it was tolerated for a period, then the authorities stepped in. It's been reported that there was a clandestine meeting of mayors along with officials from Homeland Security to discuss how to move against the OWSy movement. Within a very short time heavily militarized police succeeded in evicting protesters from public venues. Nothing new there. Similar events dot the history of the IWW and it's attempts to organize citizens.

An emboldened plutocracy even attempted, most notably in Wisconsin, to outlaw collective bargaining by various unions. They met with strong resistance as members of the middle and working class, awakened and often impoverished by an economic recession that resulted from greed and malfeasance on the part of the Wall Street plutocrats, aided and abetted by a millionaire Congress that voted against the interests of average Americans and in the interests of the financial oligarchy, stood up against a naked power grab by the Wisconsin governor.

In Michigan the governor has, independently and arbitrarily, declared his right to take control of any town or city that is in financial difficulty, put in place an "overseer", override the actions of elected officials, sell off any assets that the town or city might have, abrogate contracts, and, in essence, become the "dictator" of all of that entities existence. That too is meeting with resistance.

The Congress of the United States, the majority of whom are millionaires, is now clearly in thrall to the financiers, to the very very wealthy. The income inequality in America now approaches that found in third world countries and the economic recession created by Wall Street limits the ability of the average America to resist, or even to elect officials who might truly represent the interests of the middle and working classes in this country. Our Supreme Court, too, is obligated to the financial powers that, in essence, rule this country.

What To Do: (More to come)
It may be too late to do anything. The recent act, signed by President Obama, allowing officials to preemptively confine any individual indefinitely without giving that person, citizen or not, access to our legal system, is just an addition to the infamous Espionage Act of 1917 and its amendments, the so-called Sedition Act of 1918. The Act was originally intended to prohibit any interference with military operations, the support of enemies during wartime, to stop insubordination in the military or interference with military recruitment. It was used, for example, to prosecute someone who, in a bar, said that he thought the War was bunk (he was put in prison for eight years). The Supreme Court ruled that the Act was not unconstitutional and it is still in effect. It's been used to prosecute everyone from Eugene Debs, Socialist Presidential Candidate, the poet e.e. cummings, to Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame. President Obama's order merely extends it and moves its' actions beyond the scope of our legal system. 


The Act is a powerful tool in the hands of the powerful (I'll write more about it in my next post). Combine it's power with a demonstrably conservative Supreme Court, the same one that just ruled that corporations are people, and there are formidable obstacles to overcome by anyone or any group attempting to fight for the rights of the middle and working classes. 


Somehow we need to remove the overwhelming power of great wealth in deciding who represents us in Congress. We need to somehow recreate our lost representative democracy. We need to change the way in which the Constitution is amended in order to make it more responsive to historical and social changes that have occurred since it's inception. (More about that later). But perhaps, most simply, we need to hark back to the IWW's slogan: One Big Union. 


We, as members of the working class - and the middle class is included in that group - must remember that our interests, and the freedoms we require, are not the same as those of the plutocracy that now runs this country. We need to become One Big Union.

******

A short footnote: it gives me a chill to realize that, by writing something as simple and innocuous as this little screed, I could be subject to arrest, prosecution, and incarceration under the Espionage/Sedition Act. We Americans think we're free and that we have certain inalienable rights. That is not true.