Thatched Cottage

Post-Modern Savagery

2011-10-21T12:27:00.004-04:00

...or this?

The latest images documenting the death of the latest tyrant to fall, in this case Libya’s Oadaffi, provide the most recent reminder of the savagery that has begun to dominate a process that has been touted as the path to democracy. In recent times, we have been treated to the public hanging of Sadaam Hussein, a Navy Seal ninja death squad assassinating Osama Bin Laden, and prior to the brutal killing of Muammar Qadaffi, the high-tech liquidation via a drone attack of an American citizen who had thrown in his lot with Al Qaeda, Anwar Al-Awlaki. The growing acceptance of the use of death squads can only be written down as a descent into an acceptance of vigilantism and state terror.

Extra-legal or quasi-legal assassination of political figures is, of course, far from a new phenomenon. The pages of history—both modern and ancient—are drenched with the blood of men, women and children killed for political motives. Yet, the recent spate of killings seems ominous. In the past, whether we consider and reflect upon the deaths in the 1960s of the two Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, etc., it seems that we were at least invited to look upon their murders as the work of dark forces, working outside of the realm of law and of due process. In the aftermath of World War II, the worst bloodbath in human history, with upwards of 70 million dying as combatants, innocent civilians or concentration camp victims, humanity seemed to reel back in horror and attempted to put in effect rules governing the punishment of those labeled as war criminals. (It is obviously the winners of a war who determine who will get tagged with that label. As James Bradley notes in his book, Flyboys, one U.S. general wrote, “We used to say in Tokyo that the U.S. had better not lose the next war, or our generals and admirals would all be shot at sunrise without a hearing of any sort.”) Since the “War on Terror” was initiated by the U.S. (after suffering its first attack by a foreign power since our cousins invaded in 1812, and after having had the luxury of participating in the second world war without a single American city being bombed), our nation has revealed a heretofore uncharacteristic (or, worse, dare we say) unacknowledged bloodthirstiness. There seem to be no rules to assure the humane treatment of our present enemy combatants, and, when they meet their grisly demise, we are all invited to celebrate the bloodbath. This is different. This is something new in our public behavior. And it is an ominous sign. Is this who we have become as a people? Let us hope that this behavior does not speak for all but a small percentage of the American people, and that the rule of law can be restored.

OWS, The New York Times, CNN, HULU and RT

2011-10-16T03:31:00.007-04:00

The map on the left was published on a business web site to indicate locations around the globe that were planning to participate in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement on Saturday, October 15th. (Here the color red, currently being borrowed by the Orwellian sages in the Republican Party and an obedient mainstream media to indicate the party's areas of domination and influence, seems to revert to its more traditional symbolism of standing for the dread forces of rebellion and revolution...reminiscent of the Brezhnev years when American journals like Time, Newsweek and News and World Report would show the threat of communism engulfing the entire globe in large pools of red, no?) A form of globalization that I can live with seems to be taking place right now, one that the IMF, the World Bank, the ITO and Tom Friedman may not find so appealing. Will something substantial come of this? Much is made by the usual talking heads in the media of the OWS folks not having a list of demands. I found --in a stunning epiphany that might have come from the mind of Marshal McLuhan--that the mere act of trying to follow what is going on with the movement and the protests taking place is itself enough to reveal, for me, at least, what makes me angry enough to take to the streets and join in the protests.

Let me walk you through my experience. I relied, as many now do, on the internet to obtain information, and since I am still mainstream enough to continue to accept the New York Times as the "newspaper of record," I first went to its web page. But, oh, that would not work. I had forgotten that the Times no longer gives me access to its news stories at the moment since I have "used up" the limit of 20 articles for the month it imposes on all who do not pay for its services. The electronic version of the paper had already been drowning in advertising. On a given day, the site may open with a full page ad as a preface to actual news. On each and every day, there is a large, often animated, ad just beneath the paper's banner. Though sorely tested by the paper's new policy, I have so far held out. I will not subscribe--even if it means giving up the secret, nasty pleasure I have taken in posting my responses to such as Paul Krugman and David Brooks and counting the "recs" my efforts had elicited. (Range: zero to over 600.)

I then went to CNN.com where once again, each sound bite was prefaced by what seemed an interminable commercial. It was the last straw. "Doesn't take much," you may say, "to set you off, does it?" You see, something had happened earlier in the evening that served to really take me to the edge. Prior to resorting to the internet, I had turned to Channel 75 on my shiny new HD television set so that I could watch Amy Goodman's Democracy Now, only to find I could no longer get Channel 75. What came on the screen was a scrambled picture accompanied by garbled sound. Must be a coincidence. Certainly, the cable provider wouldn't censor Amy.

Then, in a lapse of dedication to my task, I decided to console myself by catching up on an episode of my favorite BBC series, Doc Martin. I recalled a friend telling me that there was a site called "Hulu" that allows one to watch television shows on line. Of course, it was annoying to find that I had to "register" with Hulu before they would give me access, but I am getting used to jumping through this particular hurdle on the net. And, lo and behold, as they say, after entering Doc Martin in the seach box, a screen appeared that promised to make available to me all those episodes I had missed. Imagine my excitement. When I made my choice and double-clicked on a still from the show, it appeared to be loading rather quickly, and, although my pleasure sagged a bit after seeing a notice to the effect that there would be something like "light commercial interruption," my spirit rebounded at the strains of the show's theme music. Within moments, however, a commercial interrupted the program. Actually two commercials. I stuck with it, but my perserverance was rewarded with about eighteen commercials over the course of the program. Adding insult to this injury was a little message at the top of my screen that appeared with each commercial asking me, "Does this commercial interest you? Yes? No?" I, of course said no, and was assured that adjustments would be made. Within two or three minutes the very same commercials appeared on my screen. I made a note to myself to unsubscribe to Hulu as soon as I could stomach the process of doing so.

I then recalled that a friend had recommended RT as a news source, a media outlet that originates in Russia. There I found that--without any commercial interruption--no pop-up ads or similar distasteful phenomena, I could navigate through a number of news reports on what was happening right here in New York's Times Square as well as in several major cities around the world. RT had its version of the map that begins this piece, a clearer map showing that literally hundreds of cities were allying themselves with the stalwarts in Zucotti Park, even, it appears protesting under the umbrella label of Occupy Wall Street. How interesting, I thought, that after almost a century of communist rule, journalism coming out of Russia seemed so superior to anything our beloved homeland was turning out.

If there is any one aspect of life under latter-day capitalism that would send me out into the streets raising my voice in protest, it is the feeling that we are drowning, suffocating in advertising. And the more desperate the crisis in the capitalist realm, the more advertising is directed at us. Phrases from the past come in rushes--"the business of America is business," "what's good for General Motors is good for the country," an old boss who once told me, "If I wrapped a pile of manure attractively enough and put it in my store window, someone would buy it."

What is it the protesters want? Well, I can't speak for all of them, but I know what I want. I want to be free of advertising. I cannot recall a single television commercial I have ever seen, (and I must have seen about ten million since as a child I was entranced by such as Kukla, Fran and Ollie and the Ernie Kovack's morning show to become addicted to televison), that ever prompted me to buy anything. Not a single bar of soap. The endless stream of ads has only become more profuse since the Reagan era and the end of regulation. It has slowly creeped into what we still call public television. It takes up ever more space and pages in most printed matter, crowding out content, even merging with content to the point where one often finds it difficult to distinguish ads from content. It even tells us what drugs to urge on our physicians while pretending a kind of wholesome transparency by admitting of such side effects as sexual stimulation that may require emergency room care, blindness or death.

With what triumphant airs did we sing the praises of all those Coke and Marlboro and Benetton and McDonald's ads as they came to light up the Moscow streets. No longer would the soviet masses be condemned to their grey lives. Give them more plastic, more neon, more color. They're eating it up.

As for me, I'll take grey.

The Wall Street Occupation

2011-10-07T12:30:00.001-04:00

Among the many signs in evidence in Zucotti Park, currently occupied by a group of protesters, was one that announced, "Class War Ahead." Of late, that phrase has emanated from the mouths of far more Republicans than from any group on the left. How is it, some ask, that the right has the nerve, given its own actions, of suggesting that class warfare is the unique tactic of the left? What, if not class warfare, could better describe right wing behavior over the last thirty years and more?

Beyond merely flying in the face of reality, the co-opting of the left's rhetoric and even some of its imagery has, by now, become a tired tactic in the right wing's "play book." Examples of the Orwellian use of twisted logic, inversions, euphemism and emotionally charged neologisms is too long to catalog here since the attempt to "own the language" became particularly frenzied back in the Reagan era when so-called neo-liberals (mostly ex-anti-Stalinist leftists) joined forces with the older brand of Republicans and bestowed upon them their full talent at double-speak. The phenomenon was propelled, too, by virtue of the fact that the long term alliance between the Jewish and Black advocacy communities had broken down, and, following the Yom Kippur War in Israel, a newly energized Zionism found an ally in the right wing evangelical Christian community. In the good old days, the only right wing "intellectual" on the radar was William F. Buckley, a man who, by current standards, was a straight shooter. The old Trotskyites who had begun to crowd into the Republican Party, however, soon taught the right how to "mess with their minds" with all the aplomb of Ivy Leaguers writing for their campus satire journals. To cite some obvious examples, we now live in a "homeland" (a neologism with echoes of the German heimat), where "red" states (formerly the iconic color of the left) are Republican states, where civilian casualties of war are "collateral damage" (euphemism), where communists in the old USSR and elsewhere are "right wingers" (twisted logic). The right wing cabal at the University Chicago even claimed a unique concern for spreading democracy even if--as, outstandingly in Iraq--it had to be imposed by way of U.S. blockbuster bombs. What all of this amounts to is a well-organized and truly relentless disinformation (read old days propaganda) campaign by the right.

Thus, after over thirty years of unceasing attacks on unions, on the working and middle classes that have resulted in a stagnant or lower standard of living for most Americans, and given us, we have lately been told, 46 million Americans living below the poverty line, the most regressive tax structure in our history, the greatest maldistribution of wealth (with one percent living in heretofore unheard of wealth with everyone else sharing the crumbs), with the de-industrialization of the nation and gravely ailing social institutions, with an ever more vulgar and degraded public culture for the vast majority, the right, confronted with any signs of resistance to these trends, cries out, Class Warfare!

When, with the greed of the upper classes having turned into a feeding frenzy invited by the deregulation of financial markets and finally, as was inevitable, it collapsed in on itself, the propaganda mills began to work overtime. Only the hopelessly naive, it soon became clear, should have expected them to show any signs of guilt or remorse. Rather than confess to the dangers to the common man and woman that their unchecked risk-taking posed, rather than admit that their brand of capitalism had failed and brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy, the right found an explanation for the collapse that took many Americans by surprise. The villains in the collapse were not the reckless, greedy and criminal elements within the world of finance. No, it was poor Black Americans who bought homes they could not afford! Soon added to this list of villains were the nation's school teachers, who had the nerve to belong to unions and still have defined benefit pensions!

Black Americans on the verge of foreclosure and school teachers struggling to maintain their family budgets must have been amazed to find that they had had the power to destroy the most powerful economy on the planet. What is truly alarming is that the right's strategy worked. Enough Americans were convinced that, in the by-election year of 2010, the Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. Whatever gains had been made by the Democrats during the first two years of the Obama administration came under a fanatical and ceaseless attack. The president's health bill is still being challenged in the courts, Dodd-Frank, a bill designed to restore some regulatory sanity to Wall Street and the Banks and the Consumer Protection Bill shepherded by consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren both face strenuous opposition.

List of Demands

2011-10-04T12:43:00.003-04:00

Since the observation is being made by the mainstream media that the protesters have not made a list of demands, I offer the following draft document:

National Health Insurance.

Guaranteed employment for all Americans.

Increase in the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour.

Initiation of talks leading to the universal illegalization of all nuclear weapons.

Withdrawal of all U.S. forces from: Iraq, Afghanistan, Okinawa, Korea, Germany, Kosovo, and others of the nearly 1,000 U.S. military bases all over the globe.

A cut of at least 50% in the overall military budget.

Reinstitution of the draft during constitutionally approved wars and a prohibition on the hiring of private military personnel.

Cessation of all foreign aid that does not take the form of medical supplies, food, construction materials or personnel assistance.

Signing of the Geneva Accords prohibiting attacks on civilian populations.

Signing of the Kyoto Accords.

Full and adequate funding for the EPA, the FDA, FCC, FAA, OSHA, the SEC and other watchdog and consumer protection agencies.

An absolute prohibition of torture.

Reaffirmation of habeus corpus and other safeguards in our constitution.

Trials or release for all those held at Guantanamo.

Institution of a war crimes tribunal for all those responsible for the illegal war in Iraq as well as for all government officials who allowed or encouraged the use of torture.

Faithful adherence to the Geneva Conventions governing the rules of warfare.

A jobs program growing out of investment in:

mass transit

railroads, light rail, trolleys and jitneys

public housing

school construction

repair of infrastructure to include a Make America Beautiful component

A progressive tax system that ranges from 0% to 95%.

Elimination of all off-shore tax shelters.

Removal of all taxes on household items and clothing.

A 100% tax on all luxury goods and a 75% inheritance tax.

A minimum of 50 miles to the gallon for all passenger cars.

Elimination of the SUV loophole with regard to mileage requirements.

A tax on gasoline adequate to fund work on mass transit and railroads.

Federal financing of the public schools.

Free college tuition and free vocational training for all qualified students.

A reparations program for the descendants of slaves in the form of free tuition at colleges and universities, free job training, guaranteed employment, housing subsidies, investment in demographically Black communities in the form of housing, schools, libraries and enhanced social services.

Honoring of all treaties made with American Indians.

Limit on television advertising to a maximum of five minutes per hour. Elimination of all advertising on public television. Abolition of all drug advertising in all media except medical journals.

Decriminalization of all drug use.

Registration of all firearms. Prohibition of sale of all automatic weapons.

Labels on all products sold indicating all of their chemical contents as well as their possible hazards to health and the environment.

Institution of protections for children from all media and other products containing the exploitation of violence and pornography.

Institution and strict enforcement of protections for the humane treatment of all animals raised for human consumption or for use in scientific experimentation.

Tax-free status for all newspapers as well as other subsidies designed to promote print media.

Feel free to add to this list:

Tick, tick, tick...

2011-08-11T12:51:00.004-04:00

The United States and its spiritual antecedent in the old empire are forever bound it seems in the noble endeavor of keeping the world safe for their various aristocratic and pretend aristocratic masters of the universe. Whether it is Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher working in tandem to rid their nations of allegedly feather-bedding unions in the 1980s or now, some thirty years after their victorious crusade, when one's nose gets tickled the other one sneezes. Yet, once again, the clock is ticking.

While, at the moment, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron seems not to have a direct counterpart in Democratic President Barack Obama, he might as well have. The young man who was elected to give us redemption from the excesses and crimes of the previous administration and even what some saw as reparation (albeit on the cheap) for the crimes of slavery, has ineffectually presided over a nation held hostage by the forces of the right on every significant matter of governance.

Now, as the world watches Great Britain's cities in flames, other images rush in: of Marx in the British Library believing he was writing the script for the demise of the nineteenth century's version of the evil empire, or, in our own century, of Naomi Klein drafting her warning call in The Shock Doctrine, or of disenfranchised Black Americans burning down their own cities, or even of Reichstag fires and a cataclysmic war that followed. Many commentators have seen in the right's recipe to save capitalism as we have known it a return to the nineteenth century, a century of laissez-faire capitalism and the absence of social welfare programs. If this is true, and the economic masters have not learned the lessons of history, we are in for a very tough time indeed.

For, in fact, the prosperity that the advanced industrial nations enjoyed for a brief period after World War II was paid for with tens of millions of lost lives. Capitalism is like the mythic phoenix that goes down in flames and is then reborn out of its own ashes. The communist revolutions in Russia and China that laid claim to breaking the cycle proved incapable of doing so. What their brief tenure did accomplish, however, was to provide an excuse for the capitalist world to divert the largest single portion of its wealth to financing gargantuan war machines. It was neither the reformist regimen of Franklin Roosevelt nor the revolutions in Russia and China that proved capable of--even temporarily--meeting the needs of modern humanity. Instead, it was an insane dance of destruction and rebuilding on the graves of millions of men, women and children.

We now seem dangerously close to repeating the tragic errors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As austerity programs are put in place in the aftermath of the Financial Panic of 2008 concurrent with the greatest gap between rich and poor the world has ever seen, the inevitable has occurred. Cet animal est très méchant: quand on l'attaque il se défend. "This animal is vicious: when attacked, it defends itself." goes the old saying. Whether in London or Athens or Cairo or Madison, Wisconsin, the aggrieved have begun to take to the streets. Take away workers' voices by destroying their unions, take away their pensions, their health benefits, their access to decent schools and libraries, their very access to a means to put bread on the table for their families, and--eventually--they will react.

War is such a simple, elegant solution. So many surplus laborers are just killed off. So many jobs are created to build and replenish the weapons of their own destruction. And, of course, the masters have once again saved their hoarded wealth from the attacking mob. Tick...tick...tick...

World War III

2011-07-28T09:12:00.002-04:00

Many Americans are dismayed by the prospect of their country, still the most powerful and affluent in the world, coming to resemble some second-tier nation like Greece as it appears to tempt disaster by going into default and essentially declaring bankruptcy. In the recent past, “austerity budgets” were complacently viewed as measures imposed on fiscally irresponsible nations by the International Monetary Fund. Now, just as in the 1980s, when President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher were forced by stagnating economic conditions to rewrite the social contract that had been created out of the class struggles of the 1930s, both Europe and the United States are compelled by an even graver economic crisis to further roll back the advances that had come out of those struggles. Until recently, liberal Americans desirous of enhancing our own version of the welfare state, (recently renamed, with the usual respect for language demonstrated by the right, the “entitlement” state), could point to European models. Now, however, with the onset of a globalized economy largely spearheaded and modeled by the U.S., and austerity measures being imposed not just in London, but in every European capital from Paris to Athens, we are witnessing a trans-Atlantic strategic alliance the likes of which has not been seen since World War II.

In the good old days, Ike and Monty could pore over their maps and plan their battle against a common, external foe. Conquer Germany and Japan, and all would once again be right with the world. That conflict resulted in an estimated 70 million human casualties, many dying on the same ground that just twenty-five years earlier had cost nearly 40 million lives. The root cause of those cataclysmic wars was an underlying economic crisis which all sides shared in common but then had the “luxury” of externalizing in some demonic foe. The fall of the Soviet Union, the erstwhile candidate as a force for evil, (Reagan’s Evil Empire), left the modern industrial nation states of the world faced with a novel situation in world history—when the next crisis occurred, they would have to conclude, with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, that “the fault was not in our stars, But in ourselves.” We are thus faced with all the preconditions for grand alliances being formed against a common enemy with none available. Moscow and China, though not exactly best friends of the West and armed to the teeth, seem thoroughly reconciled to their respective fates of building casinos and speed trains. Feeling cornered, and badly needing an excuse to go to war, it is possible that the twenty-first century will revert to the fourteenth in yet another respect and resort to a religious crusade, raining havoc on Tehran—unless, of course, the other axes of evil in Havana or Pyongyang attack us. Attacking Tehran would seem to ill-advised, since, at the inevitable cost of countless lives, the global economic and political reshuffling that the two world wars accomplished would be far out of reach. (Although we probably should not rule out absolute madness.) Nevertheless—even if we are not quite ready to acknowledge the fact— we already in the midst of World War III, only this time the masters of the trans-Atlantic alliance, seated worriedly at their conference tables, can come up with no better plan than to tear up contracts with their own people that, in some cases, took centuries to ratify. They have thereby found their enemy in such as unionized workers, school teachers, the aged, the poor, the uneducated and, to put a fine point on it, potentially just about everyone beyond the moat.
Former President Bush, to cite just one example, showed no reluctance to tear up one such contract drawn as far back as 1215, when King John was compelled to sign the Magna Carta. That may be seen as merely a war-time expedient, but here in the U.S., we are virtually being buried in shredded contracts, falling on us out of the skies of Washington and various state capitals like ticker-tape. This regimen proceeds with the assistance of the highest court in the land, a currently far right institution that produces, at turns, obvious findings such as the right of corporations to spend unlimited company assets on political candidates in their favor, as well as a rather shocking and crass betrayal of no less significant a tenet of conservative philosophy than the sacredness of private property when it found that eminent domain extended, not merely to governments’ priorities, but to Walmart’s. The right to collective bargaining, the right to unionize at all, the right to a pension, to social security, to even modest health care, to clean air and water, to safety in the workplace, on the roads and in the skies, to a decent education, to police and fire protection, to access to free reading material, to communications of any kind not linked to the demands of the marketplace, these and more are all under attack or are already things of the past, and it is not just in New York or Terre Haute, but in London and Paris and Athens that the battle now rages.

As in all wars, there is no shortage of those true believers who, (often the most likely to lose life and limb in the conflict), will rally round the flag of battle and willingly turn their weapons on the only enemies they are capable of recognizing, namely, people just like themselves. Tragically, the last century, a time marked by previously unimagined advances in science, technology, medicine and communications, also saw previously unimaginably horrific loss of life. While one should not forget the many who have died in Iraq, Afghanistan and other flash points around the world, so far, relatively little blood has been shed. On the other hand, World War III has just begun.

Reflections on the Budget Crisis: The Panic of 2008

2011-04-14T10:56:00.007-04:00

When my generation was taught history in high school and college, we were taught not merely about the depressions that have plagued this country, but also about periods which could only be characterized as panics. Panics took place in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1901 and 1907. The Panic of 2008 did not display the classic historical pattern of runs on savings banks with hordes of frightened depositors storming their doors. New Deal reforms eliminated that dangerous prospect after the Great Depression. Instead, the recent panic took place in the corridors of the most powerful. That 600 trillion dollars in I.O.U.s that even Republican legislators now blithely reference in their speeches was enough to bring down so venerable a firm as Lehman Brothers and initiate the biggest bailout of the financial system in American history.

There is the temptation to characterize the panic we are currently experiencing even now, some three years after the initial shockwaves took place, as a "quiet" panic, which is to say that everyone is feeling it, but we do not have as yet, (with some exceptions such as the demonstrations that grew out of the application of the right wing remedy in Wisconsin and that are taking place on a small scale all the time across the country), a frightened and angry working class taking to the streets. The irony, of course, is that Republicans have the liberal reforms of the New Deal to thank for the relative calm that has marked American economic life for the last eighty years. The American working class is no longer accustomed to overt expressions of class warfare. Nevertheless, there is a palpable panic just beneath the surface of our collective consciousness at this historical juncture.

Another irony is that if there is a single parallel for what Americans are now feeling it is what took place among the millions in the former Soviet Union when their way of life collapsed around them. We have our own version of what is called Soviet nostalgia with millions of Americans longing for a return to a period of unbridled consumption, carefree debt accumulation and the confidence that the pre-eminent symbol of private ownership, their homes, would not only keep its value, but grow in value and serve as a bulwark against all economic perils. When Soviet communism fell, the quip was that "the party is over," well, it appears that our party is over as well, and there is the inevitable, lingering hangover and accompanying butterflies in the stomach.

Even before the Panic of 2008, there were economic elder statesmen taking to the Charlie Rose Show and other such venues sounding the alarm about U.S. deficits and growing debt. When the recent bubble was finally pricked, or more accurately shattered with a huge club crafted of the greed manifest among financial wizards who invented overly clever, esoteric investment "products" such as derivatives and collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, it merely hastened a crisis many observers had been warning us about for years.

In the brief interlude after World War II, the incredible but stubborn delusion arose that the U.S. had accumulated so much wealth that it could have as much guns and butter as it wanted, bascially forever, and had, at the same time, ended for all time the prospect of depressions and panics. By 1969, President Nixon was taking us off the gold standard, and within a few short years, Reagan and Thatcher were proving to the world that the growing clouds of economic crisis, which is to say, the growing awareness that capitalism was once again falling apart, could be dispersed by a frontal assault on Soviets abroad and social democrats closer to home.

As it turned out, communism in the U.S.S.R. and Red China proved to have been paper tigers. In fact, we needed them more than we realized, and were forced to create another global threat to take their place when the Russian regime proved to be completely moribund and the Chinese reverted to their traditional preoccupation with wealth even before Mao's body had had time to cool. By the year 2000, Chinese wags were observing that America had become its own economic back yard. The action was all overseas where millions of smart young men and women were leaving the farms for factories where they were "happy" to work for pennies an hour.

To be continued: Next, "Confessions of a Social Democrat"

2011-04-06T20:42:00.004-04:00

Obama Meeting Leaders From Congress on Stalemate

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

President Obama asked House Speaker John Boehner and Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, to come to the White House on Wednesday to discuss the stalemate over the budget.

228. Vincent Amato

New York City

April 6th, 2011 8:40 pm

I have seen "the rapture" before, but never so virulently as in the aura being projected by Representative Ryan and his acolytes. That this faction was elected by the American people while the dust of the 2008 financial collapse was still swirling about is truly frightening for the fate of our republic. This writer expected--apparently out of sheer ignorance of who many of my fellow Americans are--that the bungling and greed of the financial masters of the universe would have had exactly the opposite reaction among voters. Instead, (and I can't help but blame the president's timidity for this), the impression was allowed to take hold in the American heartland that poor blacks, school teachers, retirees and the ill were responsible. The bad guys engineered a free ride for themselves.

The Truth, Still Inconvenient

2011-04-04T20:37:00.003-04:00

The Truth, Still Inconvenient

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The climate deniers can’t handle it when one of their own goes off script.

237. Vincent Amato

New York City April 4th, 2011 1:01 pm When Republicans acquired a House majority, the House hearings that came to take place took on a new aura--oddly for a group that is largely white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant--reminiscent of nothing so much as meetings of Catholic cardinals in the Middle Ages. They are convened not to probe the truth, but to suppress it. And, yet, the Earth does go around the sun.

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Living in the Age of the Shark

2011-04-01T16:15:00.003-04:00

We are living in the age of the shark. Most Americans, both the employed as well as the unemployed, are bleeding money, and the feeling grows ever stronger that as our economic life’s blood issues forth, the sharks have begun to circle, and, in many cases, have already taken big bites out of us. It is the subject of conversations taking place everywhere. In spite of the fact that we are told that inflation is under control, still at historic lows, the price of everything seems not just to be going up, but going up a lot. Wholesome Americans, ever prone to being trusting to a flaw, are beginning to blink. Put aside Pilgrim’s Progress ladies and gentlemen, and take out Melville’s The Confidence Man. That characteristic wholesomeness, bordering on naïveté, actually leads some of us to believe that those who set prices will proceed gently, taking into consideration the impact of The Great Recession on the average man and woman and their families. Instead, we have begun to notice that when prices rise—on everything from bananas to well, you name it—it is not by a percentage point or two but in double-digits. Without wanting to single out any one sector of the business world, this phenomenon seems particularly outrageous among service providers—whether it is a plumber, a carpenter, an electrician or even your bank or your gas and electric providers. Relationships with service providers are often of long standing and the (apparently illusory) feeling has long existed that these people are almost family. A family member, one would hope, would show some sympathy for one’s plight, but charges have become so rapacious that the suspicion grows that many business people are convinced that tougher times inevitably lie ahead, and that it is imperative that they get as much as they can while the getting is still good or even possible.

Needless to say, the fear that this has produced has played into the hands of Republican policy makers whose constant agenda it is to blame government spending for our economic plight. No mention is ever made of the wholesale profiteering that goes on in the private sphere for the obvious reason that it is the private sphere that butters their bread. And, while this panic is on, might as well at least try to take down such small-ticket items as National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting service, especially since NPR and PBS, (though they are not as free from business interests as some like to think they are), are still just independent enough to alert the public to the existence of sharks and their unique focus on eating. Sharks don’t attend ethics seminars.

One working girl who seems now to especially need God’s protection is Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Professor who made a name for herself exposing the exploitative policies of such as the credit card companies. Consumer advocates were pleasantly surprised when President Obama called on Professor Warren and Brooksley Born, a former Clinton appointee who tried to alert the nation to the dangers of derivatives trading, to important posts. With Republicans now heading House committees, however, these ladies get essentially mauled by cranky Tea Party types, treated more or less the way Senator McCarthy related to individuals he suspected of being Commie traitors.

Yes, I am afraid we are in for it. And while we’re waiting for the sky to fall, anyone in a position to set a price on a commodity or a service must feel they would be foolish not to take advantage of this window of opportunity. It may not last forever. Joe the Plumber may soon find that most people will have no choice but to snake out their own clogged pipes. No choice at all. Get it while the getting’ is good, Joe.

From the Times of March 30, 2011

2011-03-30T14:07:00.003-04:00

Syrian Leader Blames Turmoil on ‘Conspiracy’

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday offered no concessions to ease the grip on public life exercised by his authoritarian regime.

33. Vincent Amato

New York City March 30th, 2011 12:54 pm

In Egypt, we hated the charismatic Nasser for his alliance with the Soviet bloc, loved Sadat who paid for the romance with his life, and long tolerated the urbane Mubarak for maintaining the world Sadat had created--even if it meant having to repress his own "street." Starting with our CIA caper in Iran in the 1950s, we overthrew any leader who held out a promise of a secular modern state in the Middle East and beyond since we considered such tendencies tantamount to being pro-Soviet. In Afghanistan, we armed an Islamic lunatic fringe willing to shoot down Soviet helicopters and hasten the end of the Soviet Union even if it left us with Al Qaeda to deal with. Not only have we appeared to turn a blind eye to each Israeli massacre of innocents over the years, for most Arabs and Muslims in that part of the world, Israel is merely a client state of the U.S., and it is our nation that must bear responsibility for Israel's actions and perennial stalling on a peace agreement the ultimate shape of which just about everyone is said to know. We invaded Iraq and Afghanistan at enormous cost in lives and treasure to all concerned and appear to be willing to stay in Baghdad and Kabul as long as we have in Germany, Japan and Korea to maintain our global hegemony. The U.N. Security Council and NATO are looked upon by the rest of the world as merely adjuncts of the U.S. government.

When an American president encourages military intervention in the affairs of a foreign state and labels it a humanitarian enterprise, it befuddles students of history who can recall not only the recent "collateral damage" in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan, but in all the theaters of war in which we have participated since airplanes first carried bombs early in the twentieth century.

The latter day neo-conservative brain trust's preoccupation with spreading "democracy"--writ large during the last Bush administration--now reverberates in the events we see taking place in Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Libya and Yemen. There are no doubt, men and women in all of those countries who have long desired the establishment of true democracies and freedom from oppression. Given our history, however, it should not surprise anyone that our apparent effort to resurrect the notion of "making the world safe for democracy," is sometimes met with skepticism. And in the apparent congruity of American and European policy on these matters, (no "freedom fries" in this round), other skeptics even get a whiff of the ongoing economic crisis which still threatens the new economic order and puts a premium on harmony between the great powers. It is little wonder that in another of today's Times' articles, Tom Friedman has put out a call for prayer.

Recommend Recommended by 19 Readers

Note: I was pleased to discover upon revisiting the above posting that it was the third ranked highlighted post for the day and had received 19 recommendations. The Times has shown a surprising openness to, shall we say, less than mainstream points of view.

Posts for March 29, 2011

2011-03-29T12:16:00.005-04:00

Michigan Cuts Jobless Benefit by Six Weeks

By MICHAEL COOPER

The new governor, Rick Snyder, signed a law to provide fewer weeks of unemployment benefits than any other state. 127. Vincent Amato

New York City March 29th, 2011 11:19 am

Keep squeezing, squeezing every drop of "excess" fat out of the pockets of a working class that, by international standards, after all, is still far from destitute. If only America's workers could fully understand the heroic role they are now being asked to play in saving "the system," they would happily tighten their belts a bit more. If only they could fully understand just how badly the financial masters of the universe screwed up Plan A, how close the system came to imploding in 2008, they would be happy now to sign on for Plan B, which, though authored by precisely the same individuals who gave us Plan A, is sure to work this time. A progressive tax plan, the elimination of entitlements that, out of our sense of fairness and equality, go to millionaires and the impoverished alike, New Deal programs like the WPA that would put millions to work rebuilding our aged roads, bridges, rail and mass transit systems, the continued diversion of much-needed dollars to misguided social and cultural programs--all that would spell socialism. Place a veil of invisibility once again on the suffering of Black Americans for just a little while longer (you don't hear them complaining, do you?) and hope that things will not get so tough that the army of illegal immigrants that keep us a viable economy will not run home. Make sure that the have-nots and have-not-enoughs understand that their true enemies are the greedy handful who still have unions and pensions. Keep them in their free time focused on their HD flat screen television sets with their liquid pools of vivid color through which, vicariously at least, they can continue to enjoy the life style and the bounty which is their birthright.

Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

Tools for Thinking

By DAVID BROOKS

Science offers some help in the everyday as we navigate the currents of this world.

91. Vincent Amato New York City March 29th, 2011 12:04 pm

Unions, for example, right David? Just an old way of meeting the needs of ordinary people that is no longer relevant. David Brooks giving us his teleological and epistemological musings is a fine example of never knowing what will emerge from his column, but read carefully, just more of the same. >Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

Teachers as Public Enemy Number One

2011-03-26T02:33:00.009-04:00

Published in the New York Times:

N.Y.C. vs. N.Y.S., the Pension Battle New York City should take control of its finances, and pension costs, back from Albany.

63. HIGHLIGHT

Vincent Amato New York City March 25th, 2011 12:45 pm

It is to Mayor Bloomberg's credit that when he first took office he made a variety of attempts to resurrect an ailing school system. Among the steps he took was to raise teachers' salaries. In a letter to the mayor I wrote at the time, I pointed out that over the course of a career that spanned nearly forty years, my wages were such that the cost of raising a family in New York City forced me, and thousands of teachers like me, to work a second and often a third job, and this--as was also commonplace--in a household with two wage earners. If the city was going to expect more of its teachers, that is, to bring their full energies to their primary role, they required a living wage. So-called moonlighting would have to be seen, as it had in the past, to be a serious problem, particularly if there was to be parity between the wages of city teachers and their counterparts in suburban schools where more was expected but the rewards were greater.

As the article points out, raises in wages obviously raise pension costs, which are in part calculated on what is called a teacher's FAS, or final average salary. What often seems lost in the current debate, however, is that these costs are mitigated by steps that have already been taken to reduce the city's pension obligations, namely the institution of pension "tiers" which serve to gradually ratchet down those costs. The UFT has so far agreed to a second, a third and even a fourth tier, and there is talk of going to a fifth. Thus, much of the cry for reform has been taking place over more than two decades of cost reduction measures. What this also means is that, as time goes on and teachers on the new tiers begin to retire, the bill to the city will go down. It is true that for teachers who had been in the system since the 1960s, the mayor's salary increases translated into a generous pension package since they were on tier one and their pensions, based on their FAS, would reflect the wage increases. But this fortuitous "window" would only apply to teachers who had four decades or more in the system, and their number is small.

As a Tier One teacher, seen by many to have obtained a golden parachute that is excessively generous, I can only say that, looking back I would have much preferred to have been earning a living wage during my working years, that the perennial stress of having to work extra jobs to support my family of five, with its impact on my family and on my work life largely ameliorated. For years, the UFT seemed to be finessing contractual gains toward the interests of senior teachers while the needs of newer teachers coming into the system were sacrificed as they watched wage increases go to their seniors and the gradual negotiating away of original pension prerogatives. In spite of what must have appeared to these newer teachers as preferential treatment for older teachers, for decades, the needs of all teachers were barely being met.

As teachers, working and retired alike, we understand the nature of our current transformation by political demagogues into our nation’s Public Enemy Number One. Whether it is Milton Friedman or Michelle Rhee or Chris Christie or Scott Walker, the key word is “public”. Teachers across America work in the most significant public trust in the nation. A free education for all of our nation’s children was once considered an almost sacred right. The public schools--from the little red school house to the large urban high school--were an integral part of the American experience and produced generations who loved learning and, in return, went on to make incalculable contributions to the building of a great nation. If we allow our schools to fall victim to a dark ideology, we will be much diminished.

Recommend Recommended by 35 Readers

New York Times Journal: Part IV

2011-03-24T13:44:00.002-04:00

Wall Street Whitewash
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The financial crisis has provided a teachable moment, all right, but not the one first expected.

488.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 17th, 2010
5:25 pm
If less than half of the Democrats who voted yes on the tax bill passed last night had voted against the bill, it could not have passed. In my own Jackson Heights district here in Queens, the obviously ambitious Representative Joe Crowley was one of only two local Democrats to cast a yes vote. This from a man who was never elected to his seat but given it as a gift by the late Tom Manton. One has to wonder who he believes he was charged with representing in his largely working class district.Members of Congress who voted for the bill never really bothered to justify its give-aways to the richest Americans at a time when the distribution of wealth in this country is already more skewed to the rich than at any other time in our nation's history. They just kept repeating the mantra that this was a good, bi-partisan compromise, tha alternative being "the greatest tax increase in history." The double-speak and smoke-screen terminology churned out of the Republican propaganda mill, as anyone masochistic enough to watch C-Span can attest, goes largely unchallenged. Unlike the British parliament, our Congress has evolved rules of politesse and mandatory courtliness that allows the most outrageous misrepresentations of facts. Thus, it is no surprise to see Republicans (who read Orwell backwards) to put such terms as "Wall Street" on the verboten list. And this all took place while the Democrats had a majority in both houses. One shudders to contemplate what the next two years will bring.
Recommended Recommended by 2 Readers

I could not resist submitting a second post:

500.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 17th, 2010
5:25 pm

Paul, I think I have the answer to explain the rationale behind so much that seems irrational in the stand taken by the Republican Party. The key, I believe lies in that half a quadrillion dollars of debt we were told was lying out there like some monster out of Beowulf. I now believe that figure is real and the debt has not gone away. Thus the crisis is far deeper than the public has ever been led to understand. It is what is nowadays called an existential threat, and the threat is to the capitalist system itself. If this is so, it goes a long way toward explaining the drum beat over deficits, debt and government spending. Capitalism's resources must now be devoted to digging itself out of the hole that--unfettered by regulation--it dug itself into. It even explains the giveaways to the richest one percent. Were the top one to five percent required to give, let's say, it's fair share, the leveling that would take place would itself be yet another sign of the demise of traditional capitalism. The top must be maintained. Call it a showcase of capitalist success or a Potemkin Village. Republicans understand that they must take Draconian measures to save capitalism even if it means making utterances that make them appear to be callous or ridiculous. After all, we cannot forget that in the first days of the crisis, we had already begun not just to hear the word nationalization, but to see banks and automobile companies absorbed by the government. From the perspective of a true capitalist there really was the danger of the slippery slope into socialism, and that, of course, is unthinkable not just to Republicans but to most Americans. The bottom line is that the average American, of for that matter, Greek or Spaniard, is being asked to save a system that is still teetering, and there is still no certain outcome.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

Published: December 18, 2010
Op-Art
Shakedown Street
By BRUCE McCALL
Those bike lanes eating up one or two traffic lanes were only a start: City crews are now out collecting overtime as they convert New York’s widest major thoroughfares into Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s dream of a vehicle-free paradise — and all for no more than the cost of a few thousand buckets of white paint!
To the Editor:

Had former Mayor Giuliani imposed his will on the city in the same manner as our current mayor has, the cries of "Fascist!" and mutterings such as, "Who does this guy think he is? Mussolini?" would have been rampant. Bruce McCall's piece on Sunday ("Shakedown Street") which is a supposedly humorous look at at the virtual havoc that Mayor Bloomberg has wrought on the city's streets is the kind of urban project that has more in common with that of Nero or Caligula than it does Mussolini, and though many New Yorkers are driven nearly mad themselves at the prospect of navigating our city's streets, no one, it appears, has the power to check or even question his ventures. After thinking about what is most malevolent in the mayor's revenge plot on New Yorkers who would not submit to his will on congestion pricing, (and the list is a long one--everything from bogus street fairs to bogus construction detours to bogus "parks" planted in the middle of major thoroughfares), I believe it is how terribly ugly our city now looks. The mayor has borrowed the sorcerer's hat and has gone mad with a paintbrush. But it is not just the ugliness that offends. The changes the mayor has directed the DOT to make have made driving more polluting and more hazardous. That we have to wait another eleven hundred days for the opportunity to get out our paint scrapers and restore our streets, boulevards and thoroughfares is sad, but fortunately these changes can be reversed.

Vincent Amato
37-18 85th Street, Apt. 1
Jackson Heights, NY 11372
718-478-0933

352.
Senate Support Builds for Pact on Arms Control
By PETER BAKER
The arms control treaty with Russia gained favor as some Republicans said they leaned toward a yes vote and a side deal took shape on missile defense.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 21st, 2010
10:08 am

After watching an hour or two of the debate in the Senate, I have no doubt that the only real Republican exception to the signing on to START is the prospect of giving the president a feather in his cap. Republican objections to the wording of the preamble with regard to missile defense were so obviously contrived that they almost led Senator Kerry to lose his usual equanimity and tell the opposition what he really thought.

Recommend Recommended by 16 Readers

Are New York's Bike Lanes Working?
Mayor Koch's bicycle network died quickly. Mayor Bloomberg's is remaking the streets of the city. What is the verdict so far?
Better Ways to Help Bike Transit December 21, 2010
3.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 22nd, 2010 3:55 am

The sudden proliferation of bicycle lanes has little to do with promoting the use of bicycles as a transit alternative and everything to do with a petulant mayor who wishes to punish automobile drivers for not having gotten his way on congestion pricing. One can be an advocate for bicycle use and still find what the DOT has imposed on this city over recent months an outrage that is crying out to be reversed. Mayor Bloomberg must feel that his stands on such health and environmental issues (smoking, trans-fats, tree plantings, et al.) adequately shields him from charges of having ulterior motives when it comes to redesigning the streets of our city. The facts belie his real motives. His imposition (and it is clearly his rather than his feckless DOT Commissioner's) complex matrix of lane markings and special zones have destroyed the look and feel of our city and made it into a surreal labyrinth designed to impede the flow of traffic and thereby discourage auto use, but the major problem with the plan is not an aesthetic one. It appears that if Mr. Bloomberg could not get congestion pricing, he would settle for congestion alone. And he has brought his full talent for getting his way--at any cost--into play. Although the so-called outer boroughs have also seen changes, the real brunt of the changes is on display in Manhattan, which the mayor apparently feels should be transformed into an automobile-free zona rosa for the affluent, a zone in which the only automobiles in Manhattan would be taxis transporting the rich from 96th Street to City Hall unencumbered by pesky ordinary citizens in their cars. Thus we have not only major thoroughfares reduced to one usable lane, the others given over to bike lanes, bus lanes, floating parking lanes, tree islands, ugly "plazas" situated in a haze of pollution from cars idling in traffic jams of his own creation, hazardous turning lanes, retiming of traffic lights and, of late, exorbitant parking fees paid to machines that are often defective but clearly designed to enable a cheap method of ratcheting up fees even further, but also the proliferation of supposed street fairs hawking the same cheap goods whose impact during mild weekends is to tie up traffic for as much as half a mile.The floating parking lanes are particularly egregious. They have reduced available parking on such thoroughfares as First Avenue to a fraction of what was available while, at the same time, positioning bicycle lanes and concrete barriers in such a manner as to create hazards to drivers, cyclists and pedestrians alike. While there seems to be zero tolerance for drivers of automobiles, cyclists who drive the wrong way in the lanes designated for them--or completely ignore using those lanes and persist in riding in traffic, again, often in the wrong direction--proceed essentially undisturbed by law enforcement. No provision is made for the delivery of goods on streets that have many shops or medical facilities, or just residential buildings. Like experimental animals trapped in a maze, taxis and other irresponsible drivers have quickly adapted to the absence of adequate lanes by driving over the existing lane markings, laying claim to two lanes as they carve out an option for themselves to weave in and out of lanes in an attempt to make better time. Once again, they are free to do so as a result of a complete absence of law enforcement.I am a driver. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that an automobile-free Manhattan, frankly, a world entirely free of private automobiles would be wonderful. Just give us a modern, clean, rapid transit system that we can all enjoy. It is the ultimate hypocrisy for a mayor to stay up nights trying to come up with new ways to frustrate some guy from Queens who drives into Manhattan while, at the same time putting very little apparent effort into improving public transit, in fact standing by as cuts are made to the very service he points to as an alternative. Mayor Bloomberg would no doubt respond that his congestion pricing plan would fund better transit. Well, forgive me, Mr. Mayor, but let me suggest that you make the first gesture. Improve public transit first, and if you are looking for the funds to do so, you might get some of your friends who sit on the boards of the authorities already collecting exorbitant tolls on our highways, bridges and tunnels to open their books to you and to the general public to see if they have a few dollars to spare. And while you are at it, take a look at their wages, stipends and expense accounts to see if there is any slush there.See you on the IRT.
Recommend Recommended by 71 Readers

And it’s nice to get a compliment from time to time from other posters:

55.
Perfect Gentleman
New York
December 22nd, 2010 11:13 am

No. 3, Mr. Amato, has made the best, most reasoned and cogent arguments against this mayor and his draconian traffic plan I've ever read.

Choreographing a Snowplow Ballet, to Mixed Reviews (Again)
By RUSS BUETTNER
Even before the high winds and snow ended Monday morning, cries of neglect regarding snow removal efforts could be heard across the five boroughs.
61.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 28th, 2010
9:30 am

If and when I can leave my Jackson Heights community any time soon, I will be curious to see the impact of the mayor's lane changes on snow removal. How, for example, will those narrow green bicycle lanes get plowed when they are hemmed in by "floating" parking lanes? How many of the curbs and plastic stanchions protecting those lanes be left standing after a snow plow makes a run or two down First Avenue, for example? Add impractical to the list of such adjectives as ugly and vindictive to describe the Bloomberg redrawing of our street maps. This is what happens when autocrats impose their will by mandate rather than through a democratic process.
Recommended Recommended by 8 Readers

The Sidney Awards, Part II
By DAVID BROOKS
Here’s the second batch of winners of the 2010 Sidney Awards. It seems as though turbulent times produce good essays.
61.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 28th, 2010
11:58 am

"Smart people, especially in the financial sector, now have tremendous incentives to take great risks. If the risks fail, they still have millions in the bank. If the risks pay off, they get enormously rich. The result is a society with more inequality and more financial instability. It’s not clear we know how to address this phenomenon."Are you kidding, David? "Not clear we know how to address this problem"? Where would you like to start? First of all, who is "we"? If by "we" you mean our society, a partial answer lies in your choice of the word "phenomenon" rather than "problem". Our elected representatives, if the recently passed tax bill is any indication certainly don't see it as a problem. If anything they gave "smart" people bags of extra cash to play with. Your describing such people as smart is offensive. They are given their advantages on a platter. Even an idiot could make money if that idiot is the benficiary of skewed economic policies paid for by those of us not smart enough to invest our millions in hedge funds and derivatives--in full confidence that our government will bail us out if we have a problem. Thank you for yet another insight into how conservatives really see the world and its wondrous workings.
Recommended by 6 Readers

For City’s Sanitation Chief, Fighting Snow and Taking Heat
By SAM DOLNICK
John J. Doherty’s low point might have been Wednesday, when he had to hire two men to shovel him out.
51.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 31st, 2010
2:08 pm
No amount of throwing rhetorical sand in our eyes along with the snow flakes can contradict the evidence of what took place during the recent blizzard. For most New Yorkers, the silence that fills the air in the first throes of a snow storm is soon broken by the sound of Sanitation Department shovels scraping the pavement in streets not yet filled with snow. The sanitation crews are typically out there early and out there in force, shoveling and salting the streets. This is the first time in a long life's worth of memories, that this did not happen, (1969 being a possible exception, and it was very obviously a job action by one or more city agencies that was responsible. Our mayor, the very personification of top-down leadership, was clearly stonewalling, and he got his obedient commissioner to follow suit. Commissioner Doherty, asked directly by one reporter at the mayor's press conference if the poor performance was due to the layoff of 100 sanitation workers, angrily responded that no workers had been laid off. He did not elaborate on cuts to his department. So much for transparent governance.What this illustrates is that unions are messed with only at the peril of those who discount their power. For the anti-union crowd, this merely fuels their desire to have all unions disappear, based on the time-worn argument that strikes and job actions hurt the public interest. A rebuttal of this argument would take too long to recite here. Suffice it to say that whether one approves or disapproves of strikes by unions both public and private, the strike is clearly a powerful weapon, perhaps the only really effective weapon in protecting working class interests. It is not difficult to see why this mayor would prefer to pretend that what we have witnessed over the past few days is just a perfect storm of exceptionally bad weather and anti-social behavior by citizens whose cars were trapped in the snow.
Recommended Recommended by 8 Readers

Ladders for the Poor
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Nearly a year after the earthquake in Haiti, what people really need isn’t charity but livelihoods. Here’s an example of how an organization is turning Haitians into entrepreneurs.
59.
Vincent Amato
New York City
January 6th, 2011
10:26 am

As Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" so eloquently documents, global capitalism loves disasters--both natural and man-made. They just prepare the terrain for corporate scavengers to come in and profit. Disasters are front-loaded austerity programs. That this phenomenon is taking place in Haiti, which has so long suffered the abuses of both France and the United States, seems deeply unfair. Haiti celebrated the bicentennial of its independence in 2004, and it sometimes seems that the talented and wonderful people of that nation cannot be punished enough for having dared to declare their freedom. With its relatively small population, it would take so little really for all of its people to live decent lives, yet the white European powers continue to exploit rather than to initiate any real program of assistance.
Recommended Recommended by 5 Readers

Buckle Up for Round 2
By DAVID BROOKS
The health care crackup is coming, no matter how much people wish the issue would just go away.
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

If there is an \"existential threat\" to anything right now, it is to the balance between publicly and privately provided services that has been the hallmark of the American economy since the Great Depression. Why does a majority of Americans seem to vote against its own best interests and put Republicans in office? Because Republicans, at least, seem to have a better grip on the crisis facing capitalism \"as we have known it.\" Democrats, on the other hand, nervously attempt to tweak a failing system. The young scion of liberalism who just ascended to the governor's mansion in New York gave an inaugural speech in which he committed to policies remarkably like those being put in place by his conservative counterpart in New Jersey. While many Americans fear the \"Europeanization\" of our way of life, European capitalism is ironically being compelled to privatize and put in place austerity measures that are opening huge holes in its safety nets. It might even be worthwhile for Americans to better familiarize themselves with what has occurred in China over the last couple of decades where in a supposedly communist country, 1.3 billion people must now educate themselves, care for their health and house themselves completely at their own expense. It seems a small globe indeed when, on every continent, in every nation, old orders either have fallen or are in the process of doing so, and we will all soon find ourselves in the same proverbial boat. Perhaps some as yet unborn sage will then come up with a new way of dealing with the perennial problem of how best to organize a society. Unless, that is, we then find ourselves preoccupied with how best to escape the rising waters of the world's oceans.

Poll Finds Wariness About Cutting Entitlements
By JACKIE CALMES and DALIA SUSSMAN
Americans say that they prefer cutting government spending to paying higher taxes, but their preference dissolves when it comes to Medicare or Social Security.
215.
Vincent Amato
New York City
January 21st, 2011
10:45 am
The notion that someone earning in excess of $250,000 a year is "entitled" to the same protections as someone earning, let's say, $32,000 a year in the form of Social Security and Medicare is patently absurd, yet we continue this charade year after year. Were we to be entirely honest, we would acknowledge that the reason we have social security in the first place is to keep the poor masses from rising up in rebellion when times got tough. When a rich person pays into social security, what he is buying is the peace of mind that comes from knowing that no one will be storming the gates of his mansion during times of strife because the government will have allotted enough of its resources to feeding and housing the poor to keep them from having such dangerous thoughts.Richer Americans may also want to reflect on the fact that they have a huge tax advantage beyond what is already negotiated for them in favorable federal tax rates. The taxes the rich pay on, for example, soap, toilet paper, diapers, or in such indirect taxation as on transportation, tolls, and fees are precisely the same as those paid by the poorest in our society.One need not go so far as to advocate socialism as a cure for our ills. It might be interesting for our nation to just try to apply the rule of fairness and see what happens.
Recommended Recommended by 4 Readers

State of Union Near, Republicans Draw Line on Spending
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Seeking to recapture the debate over the country’s economic recovery, Congressional Republicans said they would pursue budget cuts and oppose new spending.
136.
Vincent Amato
New York City
January 24th, 2011
12:30 pm
It is entirely predictable that Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin will be the Republican respondent to the president's state of the union address. Ryan is a smooth operator, a Catholic conservative in the old Bill Buckley mold. Buckley took no prisoners in his assault on the full spectrum of liberal and left-wing philosophies. His fervor was expressed in the heightened emotional climate of the cold war. For men such as Paul Ryan, however, the mere collapse of the soviet union was not the end of the battle,(against utopian philosophies that defy St. Augustine's warning about striving for temporal happiness), it was just the beginning of the end. It would fall to his post-cold war generation to perform the clean-up operation. Ryan got his political education through his associations with such conservative luminaries as Robert Kasten, Jr., Sam Brownback, Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp. He has been well-groomed for the task of taking on such remnants of the evil empire as social security and health insurance--two of just a handful of misguided twentieth-century social reforms that have survived thirty years of conservative government.Polite liberalism is not up to the task of responding to such as Paul Ryan. He has not only been armed with the weapons of a proper Christian knight, (particularly the absolute conviction that life is meant to include a lot of suffering, especially for the poor who, after all, we are told shall always be with us), but with special weapons (a set of noses that enables him to smell any threats to wealth and power) provided to him via the acolytes of the Chicago school, scholars like Milton Friedman.No, Rep. Ryan, our cool young knight, will win Tuesday night's debate. It will be a total mismatch. And it will give him time to prepare for the real thing in 2012 (unless the governor of New Jersey bumps him). Eventually, Democrats will realize that they may have to abandon Emily Post or disappear from the political landscape entirely.
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Financial Crisis Was Avoidable, Inquiry Finds
By SEWELL CHAN
A Congressional inquiry said bankers and regulators could have seen the 2008 crisis coming and stopped it.
457.
Vincent Amato
New York City
January 26th, 2011
12:16 pm

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King's horses, And all the King's men. Couldn't put Humpty together ...
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Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Burke
By DAVID BROOKS
Two of the greats debate the president’s State of the Union address.
59.
Vincent Amato
New York City
January 28th, 2011
9:22 am
For many Americans, there was a sense when this young president took office that he was our last best hope. In a sense, we really did believe, or perhaps more accurately, hoped and prayed, that he could turn a country around that had reached its nadir. We understood the economic desperation that had ceded the ground to Reaganism for nearly thirty years. We understood that the rust belts left behind in Northern cities were as devastated in their way as if General Sherman had marched through and left waste in his path, and that there was a new world order. We had been silent or stoic in the face of our lingering race problems, all that the civil rights movement had left undone. Even more shattering was the realization that all Americans shared that 9/11 really had changed us forever, that we were not England during the blitz or even France during the occupation, that we had had the sweet luxury of having been separated by an ocean and our youth as a culture from centuries of European war and devastation, and now we had been violated. What that sense of violation had brought out in us, however, frightened us, and we wanted it reined in. We were good Americans, more comfortable giving out Hershey bars and chewing gum than torturing our foes. We thought it was not too late, that the sun belt and bible belt fundamentalists had merely filled in during a temporary, if prolonged, lapse in the confidence of our more traditional leaders to govern.Sadly, it seems, our young best hope has proven himself not up to the task of being a one-man reparations program, FDR reborn, a great unifier who will restore our landscape and criss-cross it with bullet trains and windmills. It is possible that we will continue to be what we have become, that we have crossed the Rubicon.
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Mubarak’s Grip on Power Is Shaken
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ALAN COWELL
More than one hundred thousand people in Tahrir Square on Tuesday demanded the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, despite government efforts to block access to Cairo.
80.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 1st, 2011
9:32 am

Let's see now, no threat of an alliance with the Soviet Union, no apparent threat of a fundamentalist government; what possible rationale can we come up with for CIA meddling in this revolution?
Recommended Recommended by 9 Readers

Bloomberg Seeks a Sweeping Overhaul of City’s Pensions
By DAVID W. CHEN
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg would bar retirement checks for new employees until age 65 and require more years of service.
106.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 3rd, 2011
12:03 pm

In fairness to Mayor Bloomberg, he did, (admittedly in flusher times), finally give teachers a living wage. In doing so, he was acknowledging the fact that, prior to his tenure, few teachers could afford to maintain their families here in the city without working one or more additional jobs, that what had once been considered odiously as "moonlighting" was eating into the time and energy dedicated teachers needed to be fully effective, that teaching should be treated in our society as a profession. Prior to his tenure, the wages of teachers were not keeping up with the rise in the cost of living, particularly for heads of households. Prior to his tenure, too, other mayors had already acknowledged that city coffers could not continue to provide pensions at their original levels. We are now up to tier five, and pension benefits have already been adjusted downward. There are just a handful of tier one teachers left in New York. To further erode pension benefits, riding the right wing tsunami against all unions and all pensions for workers in this country, is, at best, disingenuous. Governor Christie seems at the moment the poster boy for this trend, and he will more than likely ride the wave into the White House in 2012. But the overwhelming reality is that state and city budgets will not be balanced by breaking unions and making union benefits a thing of the past; they are, from the right wing perspective an end in themselves. The ultimate consequence of this move against the teaching profession, whether it takes the form of wages, benefits, charter schools, anti-tenure proposals will be to gravely diminish the caliber of men and women in the profession. Over the last five decades of my experience in education, the irony is always that the more high flung the rhetoric gets about the importance of education to the fate of the nation, the more strident are the calls to rein in the alleged privileges of those who choose teaching as a profession. Mediocre teaching may work in some Asian nations where the home culture is strong and provides adequate influence upon children to achieve, but here in the good old USA, making teachers into low paid drones will spell disaster.
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Protesters Clash Again on Cairo’s Streets
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ALAN COWELL
Moving against foreign media and human rights workers, the Egyptian government began an effort to remove witnesses to its battle with protesters.
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
One can only hope that the thugs unleashed by the forces wishing to maintain the status quo in the Arab world will eventually be overwhelmed by the vast majority of Egyptians (as well as their counterparts fighting a similar battle in other Arab nations)in their quest for social justice and democracy. That such an outcome would be, to put it mildly, inconvenient for the U.S. and Israel, has been obvious for the last sixty years. The rationale for subverting secular governments in that part of the world used to be the Soviet threat. What will our excuse be now for not doing everything in our power to assist the forces of democracy in that part of the world?

White House, Egypt Discuss Plan for Mubarak’s Exit
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
President Hosni Mubarak has balked at leaving, but talks are continuing with Egyptian officials about a plan in which Vice President Omar Suleiman would begin a process of reform, officials said.
155.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 4th, 2011
10:10 am

It is astounding for this American to watch the pieties coming out of the White House and the State Department about a peaceful transition to democracy in a land ruled over by a dictator whose main source of support was the U.S. government. This may be lost on many Americans, but it is not lost on Egyptians nor on any of the citizens in lands where we similarly support dictatorships.President Obama is, by nature, a tweaker and a technocrat. We and the rest of the world have come to know him as an eloquent speaker, but after the speechifying is over, there is the abyss. What many who voted for him had hoped for was a president who, both in foreign and domestic policy, could take us back to a (perhaps partly imagined) time in which we actually stood for freedom and democracy. Such a president would make it clear that it is American policy not to support dictators who suppress, jail and even torture their opponents, even when it might serve our interests to do so.It is laughable to hear fretting about the U.S. possibly being "behind the curve" when it comes to the thirst for popular democracies in the Arab world. Asleep at the wheel might better describe our posture.
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Emotions of a Reluctant Hero Galvanize Protesters
By KAREEM FAHIM and MONA EL-NAGGAR
An interview with the Google executive and activist Wael Ghonim injected vigor into Egypt’s protests.
74.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 9th, 2011
10:29 am
What we are learning about the vast number of Egyptian citizens who are thirsting for freedom should serve as a lesson for all Americans. It contains echoes of the old political cliche about not having problems with a nation's people, but its government. Egyptians are not alone in having tired of being manipulated and controlled. The panic that the protests in Egypt have caused in various chambers of government--including our own--illustrates the weakness in the new world order that has emerged since the fall of the Soviet Union. Unafraid of opposition by any comparable force, governments all over the globe have pressed their populations with various "privatization" and austerity schemes that are designed to entrench privilege and roll back hard won gains made by working people or prevent them from ever emerging. Events in Egypt may be an early indicator that this arrangement is far more fragile than any have understood so far. It is not the Egyptian people who are "not ready for democracy," it is their government, a government that--unfortunately for twenty-first century humanity--has all too much in common with its cohorts around the globe.Recommended Recommended by 4 Readers

Egypt Foreign Minister Warns of Military Intervention
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, ANTHONY SHADID AND ALAN COWELL
As Egypt’s uprising entered its 17th day, a senior government official said the army would take control if the country fell into chaos.
55.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 10th, 2011
10:51 am

Western news reports that consist of interviews with standing Egyptian government officials merely reflect the old truism that power is never surrendered without a fight. Well-tailored, suave and often educated in Europe and America, the Egyptian bureaucrats who blithely warn of chaos if the people's call for President Mubarak to step down do so in keeping with the time-worn tradition of the palace guard's stone-walling until the bitter end. Mubarak's governance is already at an end. The challenge now is for opposition groups to rally behind a leader who can give voice to their movement. A leader unbeholden to foreign influence.
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Abraham Lincoln, Inflationist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Why does it seem as if Republicans have refrained from referring to themselves as “the party of Lincoln” these days?
168.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 11th, 2011
1:44 pm

When the phrase "the New South" entered our vocabulary, the belief was that the South would finally be joining the twentieth century. It appears that what we are actually witnessing is the restoration of plantocracy values, only this time those values are being imposed not in the South alone, but in the whole country. This crowd, which gained momentum with the Civil Rights Act signed by Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, a southerner himself, still had slave shanties on his Texas ranch. Then onto the Sunbelt presidents from Nixon to Carter to Reagan to Clinton to the two Bushes, expatriate Yankees transplanted to Texas. Johnson was forced to step down, Nixon to resign, Reagan and Bush senior would have been impeached for their Iran-Contra caper were the country not impeachment weary at the time, aClinton barely escaped being cast out of office by braving out a humiliating scandal, and Bush junior only survived by submitting to a palace coup. The record of post-Kennedy assassination presidents is a depressing one. What is even more depressing, however, is the almost total lack of a response from an opposition party. The South is refighting the Civil War and is, so far, winning that war. Northern power grew out of its industrial base. As that base has now rusted into dust, our nation has lost its way.
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Egypt Erupts in Jubilation as Mubarak Steps Down
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ANTHONY SHADID
The departure of President Hosni Mubarak was a pivotal turn in a revolt that has upended one of the Arab’s world’s most enduring dictatorships.
813.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 11th, 2011
7:55 pm
Very, very dangerous. Why this kind of thing could spread! It is infectious. Yes, as with all revolutions, there will be a hangover when the actual work of trying to form a new government begins, with the same old forces scrambling to retrench, but it is exhilarating to at least cast out one devil. If we're not careful the lesson of Egypt--that people can make a difference--may spread. Which way to Times Square?
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Eat The Future
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The Republicans face a budget conundrum, and their answer is to sacrifice tomorrow.
64.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 14th, 2011
10:45 am
The almost uninterrupted conservative regimen imposed on this country since the Reagan era has been eating into our future for thirty years. Our present is the future laid out by those very policies. It is clear that it has long been a major thrust of conservative policy to dig us into so deep a hole that it will take a long time (from their point of view, hopefully forever) to reverse a regimen of deregulation, deunionization, degovernmentalization.We need not wonder what such a future will look like. We already live in one such future. It is a nation where a tiny handful of individuals hold heretofore unimaginable wealth alongside millions of unemployed and under-employed, the greatest gap between rich and poor we have ever experienced.If our future "future" promises to be even worse, the blame can not be laid at the door of Republicans alone. When the thirty-year plan consummated in the near collapse of the very financial system that largely Republican policies had designed, innocents like certain Nobel Prize winners, this writer and probably the vast majority of Americans believed that the poverty of their philosophy had finally been exposed and occasion a reversal of those policies. Our naivete, it seems, did not allow us to predict that, on the contrary, the right would "double down" and amazingly, perversely, insist on digging an even deeper hole. What recent events have exposed is that it is not Republicans alone who have no creative response to the crisis of latter-day capitalism. It now appears that we will watch things get a lot worse before they get better, and I fear it may only be the youngest readers of this newspaper who will live long enough to see a reversal. On the other hand, as events in Egypt and elsewhere teach us, history is full of surprises.
Recommend Recommended by 13 Readers

The Experience Economy
By DAVID BROOKS
What happens when wealth and living standards diverge?
213.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 15th, 2011
3:18 pm
"During these years, commencement speakers have urged students to seek meaning and not money."Really, David? Who are these commencement speakers? Members of the BTV, or Blame the Victim group? You remind me of a minister in a near empty church who takes to the pulpit each Sunday to chastise the few in the pews for poor attendance. In fact, your particular sermon, "Meaning without Money," touches on a very fundamental tenet of conservative thought, namely that material well-being corrupts the human spirit--unless, of course, one is part of the anointed one percent of the population whom you represent.The ideal social configuration for conservatives is medieval feudalism, and you and your cohorts are doing a very fine job of "advancing" the human narrative back to a time of great spiritual depth in which people knew their place and kept to it. The Protestant ethic was a good thing in that it produced capitalism and encouraged us to actually read our bibles, but unfortunately, once empowered by literacy, too many mortals put that skill to reading other texts. Literate masses are dangerous. Thus, it is with barely hidden glee that conservatives now close libraries, underfund schools and witness the development of an ever-growing arsenal of weapons of mass distraction that includes everything from the ability to, let's say, post one's thoughts to the internet on one's iphone to falling into the rapture of Dancing with the Stars. Since modern man (outside of Mississippi that is) is no longer tormented by the fear of hell, (always a good rein on trouble-making thoughts), we instill worry as an alternative. Worry about money is a far better recipe for a decent society than actually having access to the filthy lucre.
Recommended Recommended by 6 Readers

Pharaoh Without a Mummy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The people of Egypt have their liberation moment.
163.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 16th, 2011
2:45 pm

I'm curious, Tom. Do you really think that a new Egyptian government that actually reflects the attitudes of young Egyptians will not be more inclined to wish to help redress the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank--in spite of existing treaties? And, should we see similar changes take place in other Arab regimes, will this not place even greater pressure on the Israeli government to finally allow a sovereign Palestine with a capital in Jerusalem? Or is what is happening in Egypt right now just about creating cleaner streets in the tourist zones of Cairo and instituting graffiti removal programs?
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China’s Intimidation of Dissidents Said to Persist After Prison
By ANDREW JACOBS and JONATHAN ANSFIELD
Security officials appear to be expanding the use of home confinement, abductions and in some cases torture.
79.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 18th, 2011
10:00 pm
One can get the news out of China daily on a local cable network here in Queens called "Bon." They feature a news show on which letters to the editors of Chinese newspapers are translated for American viewers. I found one such letter particularly pertinent, although the attitude expressed in it was far from uncommon among average Chinese. The writer complained of China having become a U.S. colony. From his point of view, the Chinese labor for us at extremely low wages, and we enjoy a life of relative leisure. Such a scenario may not be entirely accurate, but, as I say, it is a commonly held view.The issue of whether or not China can be considered a colony of the U.S. is an interesting one. For hundreds of years, the Chinese fought off colonization such as India, for example, experienced. There were Opium wars and spheres of foreign influence, but no outside power had the wherewithal to colonize China. Mao's revolution, what some saw as the tiger finally awakening, and what the Chinese still call "liberation" appeared to have finally won China for the Chinese. On the other hand, Mao's body was still warm when the socialist utopia he had struggled to build was overthrown and it became acceptable to get rich under a quickly constructed state capitalist regime.In a sense, that Chinese writer seems to have gotten it right. China may not be a colony in the traditional sense, or even fall into the category of a neo-colonial enterprise. What they are experiencing may be called post-neo-colonial in nature. It is a great historical irony that neo-liberal states have managed to succeed at the colonial enterprise far better than their antecedents. The question that now arises is: once the Chinese masses have had enough, who will they blame more, the U.S. or their own leaders?
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For Christie, Ailing Economy at Home May Test His Allure
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and DAVID M. HALBFINGER
For Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, the challenges of the coming year could cinch his reputation as a political superstar — or puncture it.
156.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 22nd, 2011
11:06 am

The next president of the United States--or at least the next Republican nominee. He has it all. In the land of the fast-food consuming obese, the most non-threatening of all the professional haters with a smiley face. A winning combination of phony piety, phony horror at deficits, extortionate taxation and unions, (particularly teachers with defined benefit pensions), this eye-rolling, finger-jabbing huckster is just smart enough to be truly dangerous. A gun-toting ninety-pound beauty queen with a bad education from Alaska may be just a little too much for Plumber Joe and Plumber Jane to swallow as presidential timber, but she would be the absolutely perfect running mate for a New Jersey governor with ersatz gravitas. One mis-step by Obama or unfortunate twist of fate prior to November 2012 and the U.S. will come to resemble Argentina under the Perons.
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers

Make Everybody Hurt
By DAVID BROOKS
Debt fighters everywhere, including Wisconsin, must establish a set of practices to help us cut spending effectively now and in the future.
192.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 22nd, 2011
12:57 pm

Gee, David, when I saw the title of your article, I was foolish enough to believe that you were going on the record against the recent extension of tax advantages for millionaires, but it seems all you meant by "everybody" were those allegedly Republican uniformed municipal workers. Tax breaks for millionaires are apparently off the negotiating table in your world view. The sophistry on display in helping your readers to distinguish between the sins of private sector and public sector unions is clear when you omit the one real distinction that makes public sector unions so odious, namely that they still exist. Corporate America can ship auto manufacturing to Southern states where non-union labor is available, but it is unfortunately impossible to transport all crime, burning buildings and Northern school children to the South. The right will not rest until it has destroyed the one major obstacle to the total elimination of unions.In the dystopian future that the right wishes to nudge us toward, all human enterprise will be privatized. Then police and fire fighters and teachers will enjoy all the advantages of their new status as "associates," free to look after their health and retirement needs without the evil tentacles of government and unions choking their ability to make unhampered choices.
Recommend Recommended by 13 Readers

How Chris Christie Did His Homework
By MATT BAI
The governor of New Jersey became the most celebrated Republican in America by tagging public-sector workers like cops and firefighters — and especially teachers — as 21st-century welfare queens.
221.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 24th, 2011
2:25 pm
Republicans always hated unions. What we are seeing in the current wave of right wing demagoguery literally sweeping the nation is merely the right's mouth watering at the opportunity to achieve what they have always dreamed of achieving--the total destruction of unions. They are almost there. The de-industrialization of this country due to so-called free trade and globalization--two euphemisms for large business scouring the planet for ever cheaper labor in countries where workers are bereft of rights, benefits or decent wages--has cleansed it of its once powerful working class. Sadly for the right wing, it is not so easy to export our native crime, burning buildings and children in need of an education overseas. Thus other tactics must be invented to immobilize city and state workers and to render them just as powerless as American workers in the private sector are to get work with decent wages and benefits (assuming at the moment that they can get any work at all). Truly sad is the fact that it is so easy to get Americans disgruntled with their plight to turn on the remaining few who still have union protections and, heaven forbid, defined benefit pensions. Rather than draw the lesson that their lives might be better if they, too, organized, formed or joined unions and stood up for their rights against their real opponents, they are seduced by the demagogues into attacking unionized workers. Divide and conquer.It is interesting that since the notorious Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to make unlimited contributions to politicians of their choosing, the oft heard argument that corporate contributions are counterbalanced by contributions from large, powerful unions, (what the right disingenuously labels "special interests"), will, if the right gets its way and eliminates viable unions, allow corporate America to have its way essentially unopposed by any organized entities.Back in the 1980s, in the early years of the Reagan administration when the siege of union-busting was initiated with the destruction of the Air Traffic Controllers' Union, there were at least some Americans who could still recall the early history of the union movement. Decent wages, the eight-hour work day, the elimination of child labor, decent working conditions and benefits were not handed over by corporate America without an often violent struggle.It is important to remember where we live. This has always been a basically conservative nation whose history is replete with instances of making "the other," be it blacks, native Americans, immigrants or "radicals" the enemy. The majority, through most of our history, holds onto the dream of making it big. In spite of the fact that few have and few do, the roulette wheel keeps turning. You can't win it unless you are in it. A dollar and a dream. Not the best recipe for decency, fairness or justice.
Recommend Recommended by 17 Readers

Union Pay Isn’t Busting State Budgets
By DAVID LEONHARDT
206.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 2nd, 2011
12:33 pm
While Democrats must share with Republicans responsibilty for the destruction of New Deal reforms that protected us from the kind of institutionalized risk-taking that led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008, it is Republicans who find in the present crisis a once in a lifetime opportunity to finally destroy unions and the entire structure of regulation and reform that protected ordinary Americans from the rapaciousness of corporate America. Carpe Diem. As if in a dystopian chapter out of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine," the current impoverishment of government on all levels is used as an excuse to end unions, social security and government regulation, bringing the country back essentially to the nineteenth century.The Manchurian candidate in the White House, elected by a majority to turn the demons out, has, with a fair amount of aplomb, finessed a highly compromised health care bill, allowed the rich to keep their inordinate wealth from the tax collector, invited the defunding of social security, created a commission to recommend a Draconian set of "reforms" that would leave the rich richer and the poor even poorer and peopled his administration with a cast of characters drafted out of the very institutions that turned a blind eye to the gathering storm that culminated in what is nothing less than national bankruptcy.One such individual is Ben Bernanke, whose testimony yesterday was given in a weary, ashen demeanor as he quibbled with Senate inquirers as to just how much Republican cuts to federal programs would negatively impact our GDP. Would 60 billion be too much? How about 100 billion? Are we talking fiscal year of calendar year? How much would already impoverished state governments be impacted?It is clear what is happening, The veil has been swept aside in Oz. That unbelievable half a quadrillion in derivatives (just nominal debt, of course, albeit it about 50 years worth of the total GDP of the nation) broke the bank. The rich aren't going to cover the losses. Frnakly, they couldn't even if they wanted to. But rather than totally restructure American government and threaten privilege in this country, the plan is now to squeeze out of the too fat American populace all of their resources. Make them pay for their own health care, their own schools, their own books. Raise prices and taxes (and a host of "fees") while pretending their is little inflation, and most important of all, destroy the one institution capable of defending the interests of American workers--unions.To live in a nation where its teachers are morphed into Public Enemy Number One is truly the stuff of science fiction. Its teachers, for crying out loud! And sadly, there are more than enough nervous, struggling, angry Americans out there to make of this a real issue. The Walkers and the Christies are not old guard Southerners, they now oversee the business of two of the most historically progressive states in the North.If this strategy works, and we, let us say, have a President Chris Christie walk into the oval office in 2013, we see the final consummation of the thirty years of our descent into darkness.
Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers

Tea Party Tailspin
By CHARLES M. BLOW
For the Tea Party, anger is too exhausting an emotion to sustain.

In spite of my Democratic Party leanings, last election night I accompanied a Republican friend to a predicted victory celebration held by the party faithful at a tavern in Queens. In the midst of all the excitement, I felt a bit like Kim Philby sipping a drink at an MI-5 office party. For me the highlight of the evening occurred when one staunch conservative took a phone call and then bellowed out, "Yes! Two years of gridlock and then the White House!" I was a bit shocked at both the nature and the transparency of the Republican plan, a plan that in spite of its strange recipe for "leadership," was nevertheless patently clear to the party's rank-and-file. "This maniac is getting excited over the prospect of his party doing nothing," I thought.
In our moribund political climate, gridlock may actually work as a strategy for future victories. It is not, however, a strategy that can sustain excitement or ideological passion for very long. And, fortunately, this is not Weimar Germany. Making a nation's schoolteachers into scapegoats can get only so much political mileage. Alternate candidates for the role, namely big government or one of its satellites like Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, doesn't seem to work either. And the war card has proven to be a disaster in the post-cold war era. It's depressing.
The problems facing American (and thus global) capitalism will require remedies that few are ready to face, problems that have even the once cocksure Tea Party types scratching their heads.

Better Ways to Help Bike Transit
Updated December 22, 2010, 03:15 PM
Alex Marshall is the transportation columnist for Governing Magazine and the author of "How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken." He is also a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association.
This is not about bike lanes, and every New Yorker--driver or not--knows it. This is a mayor having a tantrum about not having gotten his way on congestion pricing and directing his DOT commissioner to spend whatever taxpayer money it takes to make of New York city's streets an ugly maze of concrete barriers, "floating" parking lanes, mid-thoroughfare islands, reduced traffic lanes, feeble plastic cones warning of dangerous mid-street curbs, encouragement of so-called street fairs that serve as multi-block barriers to the flow of traffic (often several at a time), open plazas in which unwary citizens are invited to sit and breathe in the fumes of countless automobiles forced to idle as they slowly maneuver through the maze, even a one point swimming pools on Park Avenue. Mayor Bloomberg makes the robber barons of old look saintly by comparison. They at least gave us libraries and concert halls with their ill-gotten gains. His heritage, which hopefully will not outlast his third term, (itself only achieved by thwarting the will of the people on term limits), is a nightmarish array that is a monument to his callousness and arrogance. Let's hope that all of the candidates for his office who state that their first order of business will be to restore our streets and avenues to their original condition will fulfill their promise.

The Forgotten Millions
By PAUL KRUGMAN
But for a few notable political figures, most of Washington seems to have abandoned unemployed Americans.

Retired now, with the opportunity to watch House debates on C-Span, it is clear that we are now in the thrall of politicians from the South, the West and the Middle West whose "philosophy" was once considered a marginal aspect of American politics, but who now hold sway due to the almost complete abdication of what was once called the Northeastern Establishment. Unions, once powerful advocates for workers rights, are, as is painfully evident in Wisconsin and elsewhere, being rendered impotent. When the Northern industrial states were abandoned to so-called globalization and the former barons of industry took to making money in the emerging financial sector, producing nothing but wealth for themselves, all of the goals of the Old South could be given a new lease on life. Without an industrial sector (outside of the military which is located in the sunbelt and agrarian states to a great extent) and with non-union shops having been established all over the South, this is a new country. We are, in a weird way, a bit like China now, making money for the few, waiting for democracy to emerge. It will, but it will take some time.

On Libya, Suspicious Minds
By PETER CATAPANO

Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

All the unanimous vote in the United Nations accomplished was to make me even more despairing of the misuse of U.S. power. The U.S. has cherry picked its way through UN resolutions it is inclined to adhere to or to blatantly ignore. That the institution is too frail to withstand pressure from this country is a global tragedy since such an institution would be invaluable for true world harmony. The world we presently inhabit is one in which a single nation rules by mandate, and we are that nation. It is always a dangerous situation when there is an absence of checks on absolute power. We violate our own constitution wholesale while claiming its sacred nature. Only congress has the right to declare war. Libya is clearly in the throes of a civil war, and other nations should stay out of the fight.

French Official Urges Patience With Allies’ Libya Effort
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, ELISABETH BUMILLER and ALAN COWELL
France’s foreign minister on Thursday said that the effort could still take “days or weeks,” as the allies continued their airstrikes on Libyan forces.

58.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 24th, 2011
12:39 pm
Beyond the illegality of this attack on a sovereign nation, beyond yet another instance of this president's apparently endless capacity for contradicting the very principles that he voiced to gain the White House, what is truly disturbing about this episode is the apparent unanimity of the great powers. From Ban Ki Moon on down, the U.S. seems to have gotten everyone on the same page on this caper. Of course, were this to go to a vote in the United Nations General Assembly, a very different picture might emerge. Now, however, bound together by global capitalism and the frightening dimensions of the crisis that it has led to, it seems that we will, from hereon in, see a shared vision from the European powers and their satellites. Who now will dare to question the morality of so estimable a group? The pathetic ruse of having the once dissident French fronting for us only adds to the sense that the big boys have come up with a game plan they think may save their hides. Moral hazard will not be a factor here. No kind of morality will be.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

New York Times Journal: Part III

2011-03-24T13:21:00.002-04:00

Tea Party Set to Win Enough Races for Wide Influence
By KATE ZERNIKE
The movement stands a good chance of establishing a sizeable caucus to push its agenda in the House and the Senate, according to a New York Times analysis.
173.
Vincent Amato
New York City
October 15th, 2010
8:49 am

To all those right-wing wags who warn of Europeanization, it should be pointed out that it is the Tea Party types who are actually using a European model except that their ideal society is modeled not after twentieth-century Europe but eleventh-century Europe. The conservative "platform" put out for public consumption as the cure to modern ills essentially consists of cutting taxes to the bone, doing away with "big government," (that is, all regulations and checks on businesses big and small--including those designed to protect citizens from the excesses of those businesses), and suffusing public life in religious values. Their preoccupation with debts and deficits is a red herring since they actually love empty government coffers--at least as an expedient until their utopia can be put in place--since impoverished governments cannot pay for social programs. Such a program would essentially take us back to feudalism, and, of course, the enraptured individual visions of the Tea Party lot has them casting themselves in the role not of the serfs living on the wrong side of the moat, but of the aristocrats within the castle walls.

Recommend Recommended by 4 Readers

Palestinians Consider Shift in Strategy on Statehood
By ETHAN BRONNER
The Palestinian leadership, despairing of attaining a negotiated agreement with Israel, is focusing on how to get international bodies to declare a Palestinian state.
157.
Vincent Amato
New York City
October 20th, 2010
7:16 pm

Given Israel's insistence on building settlements for its citizens on territory it claims willing to ultimately cede to a new Palestinian state--a position as outrageous as it is illegal--it seems that a declaration of statehood that is recognized by all the international community (except the United States and maybe one of its allies in Micronesia) is the only road left open to Palestinians. Such a plan would, if nothing else, isolate Israel and the U.S. as the two rogue states unwilling to live by the accords the rest of the world has signed onto. Such a plan might also be seen as initiating a broader repudiation by the peoples of the world of the United States' assumed role of post-cold war Hegemon. Our little brother would not be strutting quite so arrogantly if he knew that he was on his own and could not count on his gigantic big brother for a fat allowance and to threaten any of the other kids on the block with annihilation should he get a black eye.

Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers

The Fury Failure
By GAIL COLLINS
This election season, anger has not been working out for voters and candidates alike.
107.
Vincent Amato
New York City
October 21st, 2010
12:09 pm

It is entirely too early to glibly advertise a failure of the fear strategy employed by the right wing in this country. How it will play out in the end of course remains to be seen. Those who can recall or have acquainted themselves with the history of the Depression era know all too well just how many lunatic fringe elements developed then. And, in a way, the Tea Party strategy has so far been an enormous success. All the wrong parties have been blamed for the crisis, primarily, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (The mandate given those institutions to create housing for the poor--regardless of the financial risk--by the present candidate for the governor's mansion here in New York while he was Bill Clinton's HUD secretary adds a smidge of credibility to their charges. But only a smidge.) The Tea Party phenomenon has been given far more attention than the long history of deregulation, irresponsible and often outright illegal practices that actually led to the crisis. No talk from the right about an astounding half a quadrillion dollars in derivatives floating around, hedge funds, and collateralized debt. By a truly twisted logic that is often encouraged by mass media, the bad guys in our economy are teachers and other workers who still have unions and pension funds.One would expect expressions of anger from a working class and middle class that has been hard hit, but here in the U.S., the real villains get a free ride. No one has yet appeared in the courtroom docks. While we are experiencing the most disjointed distribution of wealth in history, with the most regressive tax and entitlement structure in history, the wealthy are immune to criticism. Our most mobilized political groups irrationally invite austerity budgets, while their more sophisticated French and European brethren do not hesitate to take to the streets to protect their interests.Other than the prevailing know-nothingism among the Tea Party crowd is the use of thug tactics most Americans would associate with Fascist brown shirts. This became manifest during the health care debate, and there is a real danger that such tactics will be utilized again in the next critical debate. Democrats allowed those tactics with a passivity that was a show of political timidity at a time when they should have martialed courage enough to strongly oppose them.No, Gail, it is too early to call fear a failure. The global response of capitalist governments to look to austerity budgets and ratcheting up the process of privatization guarantees that the fear card will continue to be played.

Recommend Recommended by 9 Readers

G.O.P. Is Poised to Seize the House, if Not the Senate
By JEFF ZELENY and CARL HULSE
Republicans have placed enough seats into play that Washington is on the brink of a substantial shift in the balance of power.
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
Once again, should they lose their majorities in the House and Senate, it will be with the complicity of the Democratic Party, (I'm almost ready to join the right wing zealots in hesitating to use Democratic to describe the party, and adopt their \"Democrat Party\" usage.), that they cede the political landscape to the Republicans. Democrats have given new meaning to the proverbial \"pushing on a wet noodle\" when it comes to their taking on the whole spectrum of Republican opposition--from mainstream to Tea Party. Even in this newspaper, the article directly following this one on this morning's web page states that sometimes it is better to have the opposition party rule in the congress. Yes, that's true--if your agenda is to maintain the illusion of two-party government without having to enact legislation that would actually have a positive impact on the lives of Americans.

While this political Kabuki drama gets played out, we await one of two scenarios: fist, that there will be a miraculous intervention to improve the economy; and second, that American working people will finally follow their European brethren and take to the streets. In either event, it will happen without the guiding hand of the party that supposedly represents their interests.

Plot Said to Have ‘Hallmarks of Al Qaeda’
By SCOTT SHANE
The two packages seized in Britain and Dubai contained PETN, the same chemical explosive used in a foiled Christmas Day bomb plot last year. The packages were addressed to synagogues in Chicago.
311.
Vincent Amato
New York City
October 30th, 2010
9:12 am

If there is any tactic a government can use to make the populace feel powerless, it is the fear tactic. How dare anyone question the seriousness of a threat when the possibility of a violent attack is always present? That is, should an attack take place that results in death or injury those who react with scepticism to heel bombers, underwear bombers, and now printer cartridge bombers will seem, in retrospect, to have been irresponsible, out of touch with reality and, worse, unpatriotic. Thus, it's best to keep one's mouth shut. Nevertheless, the timing of these exposed plots cannot help but raise questions, coming as they so often do at politically expeditious junctures. Is it unpatriotic to suspect that what we have just been treated to is a prelude to our government's taking some action in Yemen, and that this episode is, if not a casus belli, then at least a justification for taking some action short of war? The fact that synagogues were the alleged targets of these package bombs makes the issue even more sensitive. Who would wish to seem less than concerned over possible attacks on American Jews, some of whom may not even be supporters of Israeli policy? Yet the constant saber rattling with regard to Iran from many Zionist organizations, rattling that has constant echoes in the rhetoric of American politicians--from the president on down--must inevitably give rise to suspicion. To attack Iran, even using what are euphemistically called "tactical" attacks, would, in the opinion of many observers, have truly terrifying consequences. Only what is called, (to take yet another example of jingoistic phrase-making, an existential threat could possibly justify taking such action, and that is precisely the point. Ultimately, how one reacts to alleged threats on the "homeland" is a matter of trust, and, if there is one incontrovertible statement that can be made at times like these, it is that there is a significant number of Americans who simply don't trust our government. Had there been more Americans who actually lived by the motto in circulation that one should "trust but verify," we would not have had the debacle of the war in Iraq, an adventure that almost everyone now concedes was ill-begotten, ill-conceived and ill executed. And one of the many reasons Americans who voted for President Obama are disappointed is that he seems to be advised and guided by precisely the same folks who got us into that tragic war. There are times, looking at our increasingly haggard looking young president that, at bottom, he, too, seems a prisoner of policy makers who feel they hold all the cards in the on-going "game" of power politics.

Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

G.O.P. Faces Choice in How to Oppose
By MATT BAI
The new Republican House majority is facing a choice between cultural or intellectual dissent.
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
The way the American electoral process currently works (works may be the wrong word) is that outcomes are determined by marginal elements within the electorate. The most significant constituency is the fifty percent of the electorate who abstain. Obama got in because enough of a left-leaning margin was so sickened by the actions of the eight years of Bush that they were moved to vote. What Obama was actually able to achieve, however, given his too slim mandate, disappointed them, and they stayed home for this round. What any rational observer would have concluded from the first two years of the Obama administration is that to actually deliver on his promises, he would need a bigger cushion, a super majority in the senate, for example, rather than a slap across the wrist. That might have gotten us the public option in health care and a bigger stimulus package in the form of public works programs or even bailouts of gravely ailing state treasuries. Had that occurred, the margin of voters on the right who have a pathological fear of socialism and Europeanization would have been allowed to rant all they wanted to, but been rendered essentially irrelevant.

Instead, we got the domestic version of the latest \"existential threat\" to our existence, the huge national debt. We will now be treated to an endless series of Cassandras telling us that we have no choice but to emulate other nations around the world who are imposing strict austerity programs (including the one-time bastions of social democracy such as France and England). They will go after the few remaining unions in the public sector; they will, more accurately, try to eliminate the public sector all together, privatizing everything on their radar screens, form schools and prisons to the very air we breathe.

The irony is that the \"band-aids\" patched together by the usual permanent government types in the waning days of the Bush administration and early days of the Obama administrations went just far enough to create the illusion that the crisis wasn't so bad after all, (so long as you were not one of the many unemployed), and we could back to business as usual--which, in the post-Cold War conservative era means laissez-faire with a vengence.

We'll have to wait and see what those marginal voters will decide after the Republican program inevitably makes matters worse.

Some Fiscal Reality
A draft proposal from leaders of President Obama’s deficit-reduction commission frankly acknowledges that shared sacrifice will be required.
54.
Vincent Amato
New York City
November 11th, 2010
10:06 am

George Soros, Pete Petersen and a host of other billionaires have been sounding the alarm over the immanent bankruptcy of the American economy for years. With the European economies now reeling from the aftermath of the 2008 debacle, (could this have anything to do with that half a quadrillion dollars in IOUs that were said to be out there waiting to come due?), conservatives can relish the prospect of rent safety nets (the much dreaded European-style, socialist economic regimens) putting global capitalism on an austerity budget, belt-tightening, all the other cliches. Unions are gone. Liberalism is dead. The Soviet Union is defunct. Now all that remains to be done is to completely privatize everything. In other words, we can now go back to the good old days, let's say sometime before 1848. Next, we can repeal the child labor laws, close down entirely the already seriously hobbled agencies that were once designed to protect us. Goodbye FDA, FCC, EPA, OSHA, etc. Our highest court has given privilege a blank check to support politicians and lobbyist whose mission it is to explain to us how this is all for the best, necessary, inevitable, for the greater good. The greatest danger to privilege is large masses of well-fed, well-educated, well-housed, healthy human beings who don't have to spend their lives in constant fear. Fear is good. Content people are extremely dangerous.

Recommend Recommended by 11 Readers

The Two Cultures
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: November 15, 2010
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
Gee, David, I hope you don't have to share office space with Paul when your article seems so clearly aimed at him. It is hard to decide whether you are being disingenuous or whether your intellectual underwear is as twisted as it appears to be. You moan about the limited success of the stimulus package when your Nobel prize winning colleague has argued almost daily in this newspaper that the stimulus package has been front loaded for failure by being too small. But when you state, \"Maybe in a nation of robots the government can run a policy that offends the morality of the citizenry, but not in a nation of human beings, as the recent elections showed.\", you fall into an equivocal use of the term morality that is hard to take seriously. For us cold-hearted liberal technocrats out here, morality dictates that our government take steps to ensure public health and protection against rapacious corporations. One can only guess what morality you have in mind, something like the morality of the warm, loving right wing masses that lives in fear of a progressive tax structure that would close the door on their opportunity to one day benefit, perhaps. David, when you lapse into such a vein as you are today exploring in your column, I fear you have crossed a line, from being disingenuous or just wrong-headed into outright demagoguery. You must know that what you are saying just isn't true.

The Power Elite
By DAVID BROOKS
As the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society has increased, the trust in elites has declined.
HIGHLIGHT
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 19th, 2010
1:29 pm

Your strength as a writer and a thinker, David, is crafty disingenuity posing as innocence. Too much transparency? No power elite? Give me a break. The fact that the "old" power elite has withdrawn from the public political process does not mean that it has given up its power, its elitism, or its role in shaping events, just that it is too refined (in its own view of itself) to get down and dirty in the messier realities of the new, supposedly "multi-cultural" agora.
Recommended Recommended by 172 Readers

What Do You Think of City’s Support for Biking?
By J. DAVID GOODMAN
159. November 22, 2010 12:35 pm
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
These bike lanes have very little to do with making our city more hospitable to cyclists and everything to do with making driving in Manhattan near impossible. The emperor did not get his way on congestion pricing, and so he has taken every conceivable measure to exact revenge on the driving public–even if this has meant turning our once beautiful city into a nightmarish matrix of green lanes, red lanes, “floating” parking areas, barrier “islands,” barricades, and a labyrinthine array of white lines that has not only made driving slower, more hazardous and more polluting, but has made our city downright ugly. The DOT commissioner is nothing but a beard for a mayor who, given the frenzy with which he has sent out crews to put these changes in place–without consultation and at a huge expense–has created the impression that he does little but sit at a huge conference table with maps sprawled out before him searching for ever more devastating ways of destroying our city. It was good to see that a protest on Staten Island was effective in overturning just a small segment of his plan, but what really needs to be done is to have all of the changes he has made reversed. It can only be hoped that when this mayor leaves office, wiser heads will prevail and the city’s streets can be restored.
Even the so-called street fairs that throw up roadblocks all over Manhattan have clearly been part of the mayor’s maniacal revenge saga. And the timing of construction projects and street closings has been thrown into the mix as well. Whole avenues are often closed on weekends with no apparent work taking place in the closed areas. It appears that there is no one who can stop this man. If the traits he has put on display are those that allow one to acquire vast billions, it has been enough to convince this New Yorker that I would rather be poor. His arrogance, disingenuity, and contempt for any views other than his own should also be enough to convince voters that men who can buy their way into office are dangerous.

Irish Debt Crisis Forces Collapse of Government
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
A day after signing off on a $100 billion bailout, Prime Minister Brian Cowen said he would dissolve the government next month.

12.
Vincent Amato
New York City
November 23rd, 2010
6:14 am

A few billion here, a few billion there, and before you know it... It has surely occurred to more than one or two Americans that when shortfalls of billions are discussed--whether it is in Ireland or right here in our city and state governments--that such figures represent the net worth of various U.S. billionaires. The fact that a Bill Gates and a Warren Buffet alone could more or less cover the entire debt of an entire nation should raise questions about how the capitalist system works, or, more accurately, fails to work. What the financial masters of the universe around the world are now telling the average citizen of their various realms is that they will need to bail out--via austerity budgets, belt-tightening, etc.--the very individuals who brought about the crisis in the first place and whose personal wealth nicely buffers them from any fear and trembling about paying the rent or covering their health costs.Tea Party populism may serve as an adequate weapon of mass distraction here at home to guarantee that the focus--and the onus--is misplaced on would-be reformers, but that is not as likely to work in most European nations. And the other shoes that are dropping in Dublin or London or Lisbon or Madrid may soon wash up on our own beaches.

Recommend Recommended by 7 Readers

Education Chief Raises Doubts on Pick by Bloomberg
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ and SHARON OTTERMAN
New York State’s education commissioner will reject Cathleen P. Black as head of city schools unless an official with education experience is her deputy.
168.
Vincent Amato
New York City
November 24th, 2010
9:48 am
The current controversy over placing a non-educator at the helm of the city's school system is the macro version of a debate that should take place on the micro level of each school. The fact is that most of what it would take to improve a school has little to do with educational expertise and a lot to do with business acumen. A school principal is asked to be far more than a mere headmaster; he or she is CEO and CFO of what may be viewed as a not-so-small business, often with a multi-million dollar budget. Most principals rise through the system from the ranks of the teaching staff, and then onto roles as assistant principals before finally taking over a school. In my experience as a teacher, I often observed principals who were ill-prepared for over-arching responsibility for large budgets, relationships with custodian's unions and relations with the public in general, to cite just a few crucial examples of factors that can make or break a school and have nothing whatsoever to do with pedagogy.In fact, some principals go to great lengths to prove they are just one of the guys by taking on a class or two when their real job is not to prove they can teach (and thereby set a good example) as it is to provide a viable institution in which good teaching is possible. One observer of the debate now taking place suggested that there be two school heads, one drawn from the business world, the other from education. I second that idea and further suggest that a similar arrangement might be wise--from the city's kindergartens to its high schools. The benefits should be obvious--both in terms of improved climates within the city's thousand schools/"small businesses" as well as in addressing the budgetary waste that is rampant throughout the system.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader

The Great Game Imposter
By MAUREEN DOWD
The Great Game is now about conning the Americans who have come to help.
446.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
Vincent Amato
New York City
November 24th, 2010
3:10 pm

Peter Hopkirk's "The Great Game" should be mandatory reading for all U.S. policy makers involved in our own imperial adventures in Afghanistan. In the nineteenth century, it was all about protecting the British Empire from the Russian Empire. For some American students of our own history in that part of the world, starting with our covert war against the Soviets, it no doubt seemed that we had turned a trick the Brits were never entirely successful at. There can be little doubt that the Soviet attempt to hold onto a satellite in Afghanistan played a role in the regime's collapse. For American cold warriors, that, of course, was the greatest prize of all. The Soviet Union is no more.On the other hand, if one takes a longer view, the price attached to our winning that skirmish in the cold war has been enormous, and Afghanistan still appears to be holding onto its nickname as the burial ground of empires. "Afghanistan" may be taken as symbolic of a whole culture with which we are now engaged and whose pathology we ourselves ended up being largely responsible for. By treating all attempts at secularization in that part of the world as trending toward socialism or communism, we created a monster. Nor was this merely a passive result; we encouraged, supported and courted fundamentalist zealots as our allies. That a nation like Pakistan has nuclear weapons is one of the most dangerous by-products of our policy.If policy makers are lured into keeping an American military presence in Afghanistan because of some larger global strategy that includes Russia or China, they may want to take another look at Hopkirk's book. Ultimately, the jewel in the crown was lost, commissars replaced Tsars and a focus on improving the lives of people in that part of the world was put off for another day. We might be a lot better off if we were to withdraw our military presence and devote just a part of the enormous military expenditures we are currently laying out to aiding the people of the area.

Recommend Recommended by 21 Readers

In Tax Cuts, the Options Run Short
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Democrats’ only chance to pass legislation on the Bush tax cuts before they expire involves a retreat, and a millionaire’s tax may be part of the calculation.
Display Name
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
The time is now overdue for all those Americans who were scammed into voting for the current occupant of the Oval office because they were led to believe that he would begin to restore a century's worth of hard won gains for the common man to seek new leadership. The truth is that no one knows who this president is or what he really believes or stands for. The greatest political disappointment in our history.

Freezing Out Hope
By PAUL KRUGMAN
After the pummeling in the midterm elections, has President Obama suffered a moral collapse?

"But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs."
If one had suggested this during the campaign in 2008, when, frankly, all the signs were there that, to put a fine point on it, this was a man who would break our hearts, one was viewed as a traitor to the cause. He would break our hearts because the prospect of a talented young man who could identify as a black becoming president of the United States seemed such a miracle. Because he was handsome, Harvard educated and possessed of the ability to charm audiences, and because we were so weary of and frightened by the depths to which his predecessor had dragged this country, he seemed just what we needed. Moreover, he had voted against the war in Iraq. That was crucial. Our permanent government had already decided that the Bush administration had to be reined in and one of its own came not only to replace a disgraced Defense Secretary, but ended up being retained in the Obama cabinet. It soon became clear that Obama himself was a creation of that permanent government, a group of technocrats whose job it is to serve not as agents of change (as promised during the campaign) but as defenders of order during times of crisis. We needed and wanted it all--a reincarnated FDR and a Black redeemer. That was not going to happen.
Eight years of neo-con government, an alliance between Southern fundamentalists, Zionist intellectuals and powerful lobbyists against all manner and form of true governance had given us an illegal war and occupation of a foreign land that had resulted in the death of countless innocents and an unregulated financial system that had created the greatest disaster since 1929.
If ever there was an opportunity to repudiate the previous eight years and to restore good government, it existed in 2008. Given all the freedom to run things their way, the right had brought us near existential disasters. As many honest observers have pointed out, that opportunity is now gone. And the man who protected the system from the kind of deep and meaningful change that seemed to threaten American business as usual now sits in the White House. Mission Accomplished.

Murmurs of Primary Challenge to Obama
By MATT BAI
That a primary is being discussed reflects how fully the president’s relationship with his party’s liberal activists has ruptured.
317.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 8th, 2010
8:30 am

The president's press conference persuaded me--at least for a little while--that perhaps we on the left are being unrealistic, too doctrinaire. Barack Obama is an extremely persuasive speaker, no less than one might expect from a young man who once served as president of the Harvard Law Review. Had he been arguing a case before the Supreme Court, a 5-4 decision in his favor might be the least that he had a right to expect. Perhaps, in the court of public opinion, too, his stance as a great compromiser will work its magic. And it truly seems that it would take a magician, or for any one man, even an activist president, to dig us out of the crisis this country has been in for decades. There is so much that needs to be done.On the other hand, it is precisely the long list of what needs to be addressed--everything from our foreign policy to unregulated factory chicken farms--that forces this citizen to the conclusion that if Barack Obama is the best we can come up with, our last best hope, we are indeed headed for a profound time of troubles.
Recommended Recommended by 1 Reader

As the Ground Shifts, Biden Plays a Bigger Role
By HELENE COOPER
Halfway through a term in which the president has relied mostly on counsel from an inner circle, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is assuming more influence.
4.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 12th, 2010
10:13 am

Not since Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate here in New York switched parties and given their erstwhile Republican opponents in the Albany legislature a majority has there been such a crass betrayal of party principles as the president has displayed in brokering a deal that would allow the extension of the tax cuts to the richest Americans, lower their estate and capital gains taxes and erode the solvency of social security.It appears that the financial crisis is far graver than most Americans imagine. The establishment has circled the wagons on this one--even to the point where the venerable New York Times has put in effect a blackout on all opposition to the Obama "compromise." This, too, is reminiscent of an earlier phenomenon, namely the tendency of the mainstream media to constantly play down protests against the war in Vietnam by under-reporting such events and under-counting the number of participants.I cannot believe that my household and circle of friends was unique in being electrified upon hearing reports of Democratic Party opposition to the plan. Little of that excitement has been reported anywhere. Instead, we have news reports of the usual cast of characters who ride shotgun for the establishment riding in to hold the president's hand. Some Americans, however, do watch C-Span and many were glued to their television sets as Senator Barney Sanders of Vermont spoke for eight hours on the senate floor in a rare and commendable demonstration of political courage.The suspicion arises that all those derivatives, CDOs and hedge funds out there continue to represent an existential threat to the system both here and the rest of the capitalist world. Working people are now being asked to make sacrifices to save the system. Any proposal that does not spread sacrifice across all classes of Americans should be challenged.
Recommend Recommended by 93 Readers

In Tax Benefits to the Middle, Political Lift for Obama
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
A hefty portion of the tax package that the Senate is poised to vote on Monday will benefit middle-income Americans, and could pay political dividends to the president and Democrats.
151.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 13th, 2010
1:00 pm
If this so-called compromise tax proposal is allowed to go through--even with some marginal changes designed to make it a bit more palatable--it will merely serve as a template for more of the same to follow. Within just a short time, we will be treated to Cassandra-esque cries for paring down government (read social programs such as social security, health care, education, regulatory functions). Capitalism is in crisis here and around the world. The "trick" that those who are currently charged with preserving the system seems to wish to perform is to secure the prerogatives of the wealthy while at the same time making ordinary citizens believe that they have no choice but to adjust to a markedly lower standard of living. To this end, the full panoply of weapons of mass distraction is currently being employed. Rather than resorting to such tactics, a little less greed on the part of these gatekeepers would go a long way toward postponing the day when Americans begin to emulate those English protesters who last week were heard to cry out, "Off with their heads!"
Recommended Recommended by 6 Readers

Health Care Law Ruled Unconstitutional
By KEVIN SACK
The judge said Congress went too far by requiring most Americans to obtain insurance, a key provision of the health care overhaul that passed muster in two prior court challenges.
2.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 13th, 2010
12:38 pm
What a surprise! Now, where do I go to sign on to a class action suit that would relieve me of the obligation to have automobile insurance?
Recommended Recommended by 633 Readers

113.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
David NYC
New York City
December 13th, 2010
1:04 pm
Vincent Amato makes the common error that those on the left have made throughout the Health Care debate. They used the fallacy that auto insurance was the same as health insurance. Auto insurance can be mandated because the gov't is not requiring you to buy an car. If you choose to buy a car, then you have to get insurance. The reason this is different is that the gov't is requiring you to buy health insurance, regardless of whether you want to or not. If this wasn't ruled unconstitutional, this law would be the first law in our history that required citizens to buy a commercial product.
Recommend Recommended by 59 Readers

Ben Franklin’s Nation
By DAVID BROOKS
America should focus less on losing its star status and more on defending and preserving the gospel of middle-class dignity.
36.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 14th, 2010
10:22 am
An extremely thought-provocative column, today, David. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution certainly changed the material well-being of countless millions on our planet. What your Swedish professor's clever chart also richly illustrates is that the benefits of this progress have not been equally distributed--either between or within nations. These disparities led even Marx to have a somewhat ambivalent attitude to progress itself, sometimes even lapsing into a nostalgia for the Middle Ages. Few sane people would choose to surrender the benefits of science and technology that we have seen over the last two centuries. Yet, unless we solve the problem of the inequitable distribution of the good that science and technology offer, our small planet will continue to be plagued by overpopulation and the strife that too many humans striving for too few benefits generate. The United States--in spite of slavery and its over-riding sense of a manifest destiny--was long been looked upon as the best hope in the New World for a true establishment not just of freedom, but of equality. In this, I believe, lies the nation's greatest potential contribution. In order to achieve this goal, however, we must guard against a very real danger visible in our present political climate to retreat into the ancient regimen of maintaining privilege--at any cost.
Recommended Recommended by 5 Readers

We’ve Only Got America A
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
A rising superpower (think China) and a rising group of superempowered individuals (think WikiLeakers) are currently challenging the world system.
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
While ready to concede that China's still evolving take on human rights has a long way to go, is it not somewhat disingenuous to wring our hands over their unwillingness to buy into a system of granting prizes that are clearly designed to send a self-serving political message? When one considers the number of Nobel recipients who took their medals with blood soaked hands or the recent case of granting a Peace Prize to a president carrying out a war in Afghanistan, it is easy to see how the Chinese may find our Western ways rather inscrutable.

Wall Street Whitewash
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The financial crisis has provided a teachable moment, all right, but not the one first expected.

488.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 17th, 2010
5:25 pm
If less than half of the Democrats who voted yes on the tax bill passed last night had voted against the bill, it could not have passed. In my own Jackson Heights district here in Queens, the obviously ambitious Representative Joe Crowley was one of only two local Democrats to cast a yes vote. This from a man who was never elected to his seat but given it as a gift by the late Tom Manton. One has to wonder who he believes he was charged with representing in his largely working class district.Members of Congress who voted for the bill never really bothered to justify its give-aways to the richest Americans at a time when the distribution of wealth in this country is already more skewed to the rich than at any other time in our nation's history. They just kept repeating the mantra that this was a good, bi-partisan compromise, tha alternative being "the greatest tax increase in history." The double-speak and smoke-screen terminology churned out of the Republican propaganda mill, as anyone masochistic enough to watch C-Span can attest, goes largely unchallenged. Unlike the British parliament, our Congress has evolved rules of politesse and mandatory courtliness that allows the most outrageous misrepresentations of facts. Thus, it is no surprise to see Republicans (who read Orwell backwards) to put such terms as "Wall Street" on the verboten list. And this all took place while the Democrats had a majority in both houses. One shudders to contemplate what the next two years will bring.
Recommended Recommended by 2 Readers

I could not resist submitting a second post:

500.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 17th, 2010
5:25 pm

Paul, I think I have the answer to explain the rationale behind so much that seems irrational in the stand taken by the Republican Party. The key, I believe lies in that half a quadrillion dollars of debt we were told was lying out there like some monster out of Beowulf. I now believe that figure is real and the debt has not gone away. Thus the crisis is far deeper than the public has ever been led to understand. It is what is nowadays called an existential threat, and the threat is to the capitalist system itself. If this is so, it goes a long way toward explaining the drum beat over deficits, debt and government spending. Capitalism's resources must now be devoted to digging itself out of the hole that--unfettered by regulation--it dug itself into. It even explains the giveaways to the richest one percent. Were the top one to five percent required to give, let's say, it's fair share, the leveling that would take place would itself be yet another sign of the demise of traditional capitalism. The top must be maintained. Call it a showcase of capitalist success or a Potemkin Village. Republicans understand that they must take Draconian measures to save capitalism even if it means making utterances that make them appear to be callous or ridiculous. After all, we cannot forget that in the first days of the crisis, we had already begun not just to hear the word nationalization, but to see banks and automobile companies absorbed by the government. From the perspective of a true capitalist there really was the danger of the slippery slope into socialism, and that, of course, is unthinkable not just to Republicans but to most Americans. The bottom line is that the average American, of for that matter, Greek or Spaniard, is being asked to save a system that is still teetering, and there is still no certain outcome.
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My New York Times Journal: Part II

2011-03-24T13:04:00.003-04:00

Clean the Gulf, Clean House, Clean Their Clock
By FRANK RICH
Published: June 18, 2010

10.
HIGHLIGHT
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 20th, 2010
6:49 am

While circulating through a car dealership lot looking for something to replace my ten year-old Nissan, thoughts of the BP debacle inevitably came to mind. "We need that oil," we are constantly being told. How can anyone take seriously this administration's position, when, as far as I can tell, no one is addressing the fact that car lots are filled with cars that get about 17 miles to the gallon, not to speak of the vast number of gas guzzlers that get around environmental laws by calling themselves trucks? And, to make matters worse, auto manufacturers run ads touting power cars with over 400 horse power engines, just thumbing their noses at environmentalists. Fly into any European city and walk around the parking lots outside the terminals. There you will find beautifully designed European automobiles that almost universally get well over 30 miles to the gallon. We continue stubbornly in our perverse patterns of consumption, ("That's what the customers want!") only because the government, after 30 years of deregulation, has abandoned all responsibility. It's funny; when Ronald Reagan's "government is the problem" now seems a self-fulfilling problem--only it's not for too much governance, now it is for completely abdicating its responsibility to the commonweal.
Recommended Recommended by 819 Readers

293.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 22nd, 2010
10:43 am

For all but those whose ideology made it impossible, the election of a Black president was a deeply moving moment, and, for many who were so moved there was relief that the eight-year long nightmare was finally over. On the other hand, what seemed to be taking its place was a kind of restoration of values most akin to those associated with what the right likes to call the Northeastern Establishment. Obama resembled nothing so much as a Rockefeller Republican. By the end of the Bush administration, the usual caretakers had been selected for the Iraqi war commission, Rumsfeld was gone, Gates, a member of the commission, chosen to succeed him. There would be a "surge" in Iraq, and a de facto surge right here at home to get us through the closing days of a troubled and troubling administration. The men Obama chose to oversee the economic crisis were an early signal that the promised changes embedded in his campaign rhetoric would not, once realized, constitute a remarkable departure from what we were used to. The timidity with which the health care reforms were put forth and negotiated became yet another signal that, as a nation, we are still not ready to make meaningful changes. And the tragic irony in the Gulf spill's taking place just weeks after the young president appeared to be caving in to the big oil interests has been a serious blow. Those who had hoped for another FDR found that what we had actually gotten another Herbert Hoover.If the impression that Obama was the candidate of the best and the brightest in the establishment was an accurate one, the first months of his presidency have proven to be not only disappointing, but alarming. If this is the best establishment technocrats and tweakers can come up with, it is a certain sign that the American elite is now close to moribund, perhaps distracted and made dizzy with the wealth the last thirty years have allowed it to accumulate. If our society doesn't act soon to make substantive changes, the thousands of new multi-millionaires may find that even their newly accumulated wealth will not prove an adequate cushion against disaster. And Greek-style austerity programs are unlikely to fly here in the richest nation in the world.
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34.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 4th, 2010
9:34 am
There will be not a few out there who will accuse you, Mr. Rich, of raining on an American parade. Hopefully, however, there will be others who will be moved by your courage in taking Independence Day as an opportunity to reflect on how far this nation needs to go before the words in its founding documents go beyond mere rhetoric and see their promise fulfilled in the lives of all American citizens. On a holiday marked by all variety of excessses and pious speeches, you remind us that it would serve us well, while celebrating, to pause, to reflect and to resolve to live up to our stated ideals.
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198.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 5th, 2010
12:55 pm
"Carter’s prophecies were wrong: the grimmest speech any modern president has given was delivered just a few years before America kicked off a long era of impressive economic growth."

No, Carter was absolutely right. Thirty years of redistributing wealth to the top one percent of our society and allowing the commoners and the infrastructure of the country as well as its most crucial institutions to go to hell merely served to postpone the inevitable. You can only tweak the dials so much. Eventually, a new machine needs to be built.
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658.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 7th, 2010
12:18 pm

If you are looking for evidence of the demise of the nine-to-five job with benefits and a pension plan, just roll your car out of the garage and get on the highways of our land. There is no longer a "rush hour." The roads are clogged with traffic from dawn til dusk. Where are all those people going? What are they scrambling for? In the "good old days," roads were clear by ten in the morning as American workers were employed in factories and offices until quitting time and the five o'clock rush hour. Now, in something akin to what the Chinese call "jumping in the ocean," millions of Americans are out there all day long in a frenzied stream of traffic that conjures up a scene from a dystopian novel. Most vehicles have single occupants and, although this phenomenon can be in part explained by the surge in the number of female drivers, most of the drivers are males, members of the sex that once dominated as "head of household," providers for the once classic family of four. Male or female, all those drivers out there are now "free" to search and to strive. After nearly a century of being seduced into gas-guzzling, air-conditioned, leather-upholstered mobile salons with sterophonic sound, many Americans have found their spiritual home behind their windshields, alone, unrestricted by the demands of workplaces no longer available to them. Their various quests will continue at least as long as there is still gas in the pumps.
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An Economy of Grinds
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 12, 2010
223.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 13th, 2010
2:28 pm

As usual, David, you are onto something here, but circumscribed by your fundamental loyalty to the system such as it has existed through most of your adult life, that is, the Reaganite counter-revolution against the reforms instituted by the Democrats when they were still our version of a Labour Party, you fail to see the full implications of your intuitions. I have just read a sentence that may help. Writing in the New York Review of Books about the recent elections in England, Jonathan Raban points out that, "In Britain, the top 20 percent of earners make seven times as much as the bottom 20 percent--a ratio exceeded only by Singapore, Portugal, and the US." All those folks you so admire for having saved the system over the last thirty years did so at the cost of so skewing the distribution of wealth in this country to the point where our spiritual brethren consists of quaint Asian kingdoms and medieval Iberian realms. The "princes" and dullards alike that you describe in your article are now so fat, so overwhelmed by the wealth they have been allowed to hoard that there is little motivation to employ their imaginations--or any other of their faculties--in an effort to change anything. Moreover, they have taken their children out of programs in math or science or medicine or anything socially useful and directed them to schools for investment banking. Why not, when the rewards have been so unbelievable?
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Court Under Roberts Is Most Conservative in Decades
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: July 24, 2010
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
Aside from the times that Congressional committees treated Oliver North (who was allowed to appear in uniform no less) with kid gloves, the two most Kafkaesque Congressional hearings I have ever observed were the confirmation meetings for Justices Alito and Roberts. If the present court is a travesty, Democrats are as much to blame as Republicans. If a layman could tell, listening to what these two men had to say and what their history was like, that these two characters were only mouthing moderation and judicial temperance, House and Senate Democrats certainly should have been able to tell. Yet both men were approved with votes from Democrats. One of the definitions of fascism is corporate control of government. Let's hope only four and not five of these justices are blind to that distinction. Dangerously close.

Vincent Amato
New York City
August 7th, 2010
10:02 am
Dr. Krugman, I read your column today, share your outrage, and appreciate your being there to express what so many of us out here feel. Thank you for that. All that I have learned about the conservative mode of thought indicates that although on the one hand Republicans exist to protect and advance the cause of the wealthy and powerful, that is not their sole motivation. There is an essential mean-spiritedness that is not so simple but rather a complex broth made up partly of fear of the mob, partly of a dark view of human nature, (particularly human nature set free to follow its instincts and even whimsies, most of which are seen as dangerous), partly a demonology with medieval or even more ancient roots. Read the sermon in Moby Dick; read a lot of Melville, who understood the uniquely American form of this syndrome better than anyone. This same syndrome goes a long way to explain our lingering distaste for dark skinned peoples, for Indians, even, as D.H. Lawrence pointed out, for our own children. No purely economic critique can provide a comprehensive insight into what drives the men and women who daily agitate against governments spending money on schools and health and the trappings of a decent life since what drives their actions has much deeper roots than the banal desire for fiscal responsibility.Vincent Amato
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America Goes Dark
By PAUL KRUGMAN

It is a bit alarming to see that your piece, Dr. Krugman, (“America Goes Dark”), has elicited a little tea party in response. The right wing is driven to distraction by the one lingering vestige of a viable union movement--the government employees' unions. It is a piece of unfinished business (along with others you cite such as social security) that they could never marshal enough momentum to destroy during their almost uninterrupted string of \"victories\" in the thirty-year long counter-revolution against New Deal reforms. They find it maddening that there are still some workers who can retire and collect a pension. Rather than acknowledge that the number of workers who will ever see any pension at all let alone a designated benefit pension is at an historic low, they point a finger trembling with indignation at some mythical group of fat cats now sitting idly with their $200,000 to $800,000 dollar retirement checks. Ignored, too, is the reality of the \"tiers\" set up that even unions with pensions have been forced to negotiate, that give workers entering such work sectors only a fraction of the benefits that their fathers' generation once enjoyed. Rather than celebrate the essential de-unionization of the American work force initiated with Ronald Reagan's busting of the air traffic controllers' union and the gradual phasing out of benefits for the remnant of workers who are still unionized, the right--made apoplectic by the presence of a Democrat in the White House and the (now looking slim) prospect of future Democratic victories--sends out strident alarms reminiscent of a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers whenever it finds a 65 year-old retiree who still collects a pension. Little acknowledgement is made of the fact that some of those retirees had to work two or three jobs to maintain their families because the promise of the alleged pot of pension gold at the end of the rainbow was used as an arguing point for low wages while they were on the job.
The once proud UAW stood by while automobile plants relocated to the South where the word union is a dirty word. There are few industrial unions left like the old steel workers' union essentially because there are few industries left in this country. I believe it was the robber baron Jay Gould who once quipped that you could, under the right circumstances, get one half of the working class to kill the other half. Unfortunately, we are once again living through such circumstances. With taxes at historically low rates, in a nation with taxes lower than most other advanced nations and a distribution of wealth that ever widens the gap between rich and poor, it is a truly depressing prospect to see that for some benighted souls out there the bad guys are the pensioners.

Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents
By SCOTT SHANE, MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH

In a dozen countries — including in North Africa, Pakistan and former Soviet republics — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations.
153.
Vincent Amato
New York City
August 15th, 2010
10:17 am
These operations are only kept secret from the American people for the most part. Then, as has been thoroughly chronicled by Chalmers Johnson and others, when the inevitable "blowback" occurs, it is only the American people who are surprised. On the other hand, finding and destroying terrorist cells through covert operations, ideally with the cooperation of foreign governments in the lands where they reside is a far superior tactic to our policy of the last nine years, viz., to declare war on an entire people by declaring war on their governments. These are not wars in any case, but invasions and occupations for which the cost in dollars, the death of innocents and lost respect for the U.S. is clearly too high to justify. The key concept here seems to be transparency. If there really are bad guys out there, why not tell everyone, the American people included, that we are out there looking for them and determined to take them out? The thrust of our present policy in Iraq and Afghanistan invites the thought that our real agenda is imperial expansion.
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Deadliest for City’s Walkers: Male Drivers, Left Turns
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

A study of 7,000 crashes involving pedestrians in New York City offers new insight into the precarious life on the streets of America’s biggest city.

86.
Vincent Amato
New York City
August 16th, 2010
1:51 pm
Watch for the number of pedestrians involved in accidents to rise precipitously with the inauguration of the Mayor's disastrous reconfiguration of traffic lanes on many of the city's streets. These changes are a blemish on the city and a living monument to the petulance of an arrogant man who could not get his way on congestion pricing and thus has chosen to punish not just drivers but the populace as a whole. That the new floating parking lanes are ugly and absurd is one thing, but they also represent an extreme hazard. Car doors now open into bike lanes on one side and passing traffic on the other. Pedestrians crossing major avenues now drift into the middle of the street after navigating past first the bike lane and then the cars parked "floating" in the middle of the street. These changes have the mayor's fingerprints all over them; our nominal traffic commissioner is just that--a purely nominal figure. Bicycles, when they even bother to use the newly designated lanes, more often than not illegally ride in the opposite direction. A traffic officer told me that she did not have the right to ticket offenders on bicycles, that must be done by the (essentially absent on our streets) police. This last matter is a serious one. I have observed wholesale traffic violations by private automobiles as well as taxis and other commercial vehicles; I cannot recall seeing anyone stopped for a violation in the last ten years or more. What with bogus street fairs, the disingenuous conversion of Park Avenue into a pedestrian paradise, red bus lanes, just to cite one example, narrowing a major artery to the Lincoln tunnel to one lane, endless parades, newly constructed islands that accommodate a tiny number of people at the cost of further blocking the smooth flow of traffic for thousands, we are now presented with an uglier city that is even more polluted due to hundreds of cars idling as they wait to navigate through the city's streets. These changes have been made essentially by fiat without any real consultation with the citizens of New York City. One can only hope that after the imperious Bloomberg administration happily fades from power, wiser heads will get out the back hoes and the paint cans and make things right.
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Key Karzai Aide in Corruption Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A.
By DEXTER FILKINS and MARK MAZZETTI

An aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan being investigated for corruption is paid by the C.I.A., officials said, underscoring deep contradictions in American policy.
Share your thoughts.

276.
Vincent Amato
New York City
August 26th, 2010
2:29 pm
Ahh, the joys of empire! Where is our Kipling? Where is the bard who can aptly chronicle our glorious enterprise?
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Sarah’s Amazing Race
By GAIL COLLINS

As the worlds of Alaska and reality TV collide, maybe the next new program should be entitled “Shooting With the Stars.”

Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

I don't see how John McCain can sleep nights looking back on his (or some nefarious advisor's) decision to choose to put \"one heartbeat from the oval office\" an individual who is--dare we say it--a complete idiot. That the people of Alaska chose her for their governor at one point is a source of wonder and dismay. The cold weather must have gotten to them or they were just bored and thought why not just go for a pretty face? Ms. Palin's current alliance with the Tea Party crowd is, of course, completely appropriate and in keeping with the general level of intelligence of the participants in that so-called movement.
Look, if the Great Depression forced us to live with Father Coughlin and a host of other tinhorn demagogues, why shouldn't we be forced to tolerate Palin and her crowd during the current economic crisis? No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of... Well, you know.
Unfortunately, there is a serious dimension to all this. I went to a local political debate right here in sophisticated New York City and the presence of Tea Pary neanderthals who behaved like thugs was, for me at least, more alarming than amusing. The danger is that these types, obviusly with prodding from forces behind the scenes, will become a permanent fixture of what passes for political discourse in this country. It is too early to equate these folks with brown shirts, but there are enough similarities in their approach and stubborn irrationality to give cause for concern. I frankly believe that a strong response to this phenomenon is long overdue. Our president seems insistent on always taking the high ground, always being cool or suave or unflappable. There are times, however, when a strong response is the only responsible one.

Oil Sheen Seen Near Damaged Platform in Gulf of Mexico
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JACK HEALY

The mile-long sheen was spotted hours after an explosion on the offshore oil platform on Thursday, the Coast Guard said.
Your Submitted Comment
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Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

One of the hallmarks of failing (and flailing) empires is lack of attention to infrastructure and environmental impact. A visitor to the defunct Soviet Union in the first months of its demise could not help but notice that the \"worker's paradise\" had taken on all the trappings of rust belt decay. Not only was there an absence of state-of-the-art industry, not surprisingly, eye-burning pollution was everywhere. If squeezing resources and profits begins to eclipse all other considerations, it is only a matter of time--and not a lot of time at that--before the house of cards begins to teeter.
One would think that everyone involved it the off-shore drilling business would be particularly fastidious right now. The aspect of business as usual in this incident is amazing and troubling.

1938 in 2010
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The inadequacy of the Obama administration’s initial economic stimulus has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap.

361.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 6th, 2010
3:38 pm

The frightening conclusion your line of thought inevitably leads to, Dr. Krugman, is that the only way out of this crisis is war. It is hard to imagine just how bad things would have to get in this country before there was an actual consensus on allowing government to put in place rational economic measures. Why, what would happen if those measures proved to be successful? Such an outcome might call into question the most deeply held article of faith in the American theology namely, that our chance (slim as it may be) to "score" as individuals outweighs and transcends anything so boring as the common good.And as for WWII inaugurating a period of prosperity, my memory of how things went is that war-time "prosperity" ended when the war ended. From 1945 until 1950, this country pretty much felt like it was still in a depression. It took yet another war to really get us rolling. It only came with the onset of the Korean War and the apparent determination of this country's leaders that putting the country on a permanent war footing was the only way to ensure domestic prosperity. By 1960, when Ike left the White House warning us of a military-industrial complex, it was clear that a path had been set and that that path would be extremely difficult to change.

Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers

As Stadiums Vanish, Their Debt Lives On
By KEN BELSON

Taxpayers in New Jersey and in other areas of the country are still paying for facilities abandoned by the teams they were built for.

146.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 8th, 2010
10:51 am

Before any agreement to give private enterprises tax breaks, the parties should be obligated to open their books to the public. This includes the various "authorities" that collect fares and tolls from the public. Particularly during times such as these (unfortunately not that rare)when state governments are so strapped for cash that schools, libraries and other essential services are the first items to be cut, the need to make available a complete cost-benefit analysis and a referendum on these deals prior to their being adopted seems obvious.

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Obama Is Against a Compromise on Bush Tax Cuts
By JACKIE CALMES

The president’s decision not to extend tax cuts for the rich adds a populist twist to an economic package designed to entice support from big businesses and their Republican allies.

572.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 8th, 2010
10:40 am

Cries of incipient socialism, tea party demagoguery, warnings that the sky is falling (or will soon) all fall within the same tired scenario we are treated to each time the rich are threatened with losing their preferred tax status. The Republican Party (and now, sadly, a large segment of the Democratic Party) is little more than a protection agency for those who wish to be shielded from what true patriots might define as their fair share of the burdens of maintaining a modern nation. Even they must be aware of the need for a fair tax structure, but the machinery of party politics seems to dictate that preferential treatment be maintained for as long as possible. This is not a tier within our society that gives up ANYTHING without a fight. The elitist notion, sometimes even clothed (or veiled)in a semi-theological belief that, when sacrifices need to be made, we need to keep in mind that it is only the rich who know how to spend responsibly should be addressed directly by the president. At this point, he would have nothing to lose by putting the cards on the table.

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Court Dismisses a Case Asserting Torture by C.I.A.
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

A sharply divided appeals court dismissed a lawsuit involving the C.I.A.’s “extraordinary rendition” program.

113.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 9th, 2010
11:49 am

I keep going back to those pictures of London during the Blitz. Night after night of aerial bombardment courtesy of the twentieth century's most demonic contribution to Western culture, attacks from the air on civilian centers. It seems to have taken just one day of such attacks on what we newly labeled the homeland to rend the fabric of American justice. A tradition that went back to 1215 A.D. thrown in the rubbish heap. In England, at least, there are those who will not let their former Prime Minister go to a book signing without reminding him of his war crimes. Here, a President who opposed the war from the start and won election by promising to extricate the nation from the debacle politely, delicately, disingenously praises the architect of the war for his essential patriotism. We are reaping the whirlwind of a policy of "looking ahead" rather than bringing to justice a cabal that found no contradiction between lies, torture chambers and respect both for international law and our own constitution. Our "exceptional" empire has come to be defined solely by its 14 trillion dollar GDP rather than by an exemplary commitment to justice and human rights. The prospect of a right wing Supreme Court saving the day and overturning the finding of this appeals court seems sadly unlikely.

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China, Japan, America
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Japan knows that its economy is hurt when China buys up its bonds. It’s the same for our economy, but our policy makers just don’t get it.

34.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 13th, 2010
9:53 am

With all due respect, Dr. Krugman, "Stay tuned"! Stay tuned for what? Those businesses you refer to as joint ventures are some of the biggest contributors to campaign chests. This is the much vaunted free trade, flat earth, globalized new economy we have heard so much about. Your concern for both American and Chinese workers is touching, and anyone with a sense of social justice will of course agree, but take the time to read some of the responses to your column today and you will see that the right wing would much rather focus on the alleged shortcomings of the president than do anything to inhibit the absolute freedom of the most rapacious businesses to take advantage of any loopholes or lapses in our laws that enables them to maximize profits. They care little that the Chinese are seen as the bad guys in all this--which of course they are, but not without the complicity you correctly point out of a number of American businesses.There is another thread that emerges from some of the comments, namely, that many Americans still suffer the illusion that China is a communist or socialist country rather than the monument to state capitalism that it has become. Chinese kids have to buy their own text books. Nothing is free anymore and there are hundreds of worker protests against low wages and unhealthy working conditions. Of course, Americans have as a rule never lost much sleep over the working conditions of overseas workers; they care little even for the working conditions of American workers. As the deregulated American workplace has become ever more hazardous for both citizens and millions of undocumented workers here in the U.S., it is unlikely that we will witness a huge groundswell of sympathy for exploited Chinese who have left farms all over China in search of jobs. Ironically, the economic well-being of the international work force now seems to be in the hands of Chinese workers struggling for better conditions. When they get decent working conditions, all that cheap stuff Americans have become so addicted to will rise in price and yet another party will be over. China threatens to become a nation ripe for another revolution. Could take a while, though. Maybe we should dust off our old copies of Marx and Trotsky to get some real clue about what the future promises.
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Power to the (Blogging) People
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

A robust blogosphere, with populist and nationalist leanings, is becoming the defacto voice of the people in China.

9.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 15th, 2010
10:27 am

The most important thing to keep in mind about China is, as you put it, its "shucking off communism." The shucking, in terms of its economic reality, is essentially complete. Chinese citizens are now completely on their own in a newly privatized economy. Mao's picture still hangs over the large entry gate to the forbidden city, but Mao's ideology has long been discarded. It took a New York minute for the Chinese to throw over what came to be called the "gang of four" and put the entrepreneurial machine in full throttle. The ruling elite in China keeps its purely titular relationship to communism out of obvious concern over keeping peace with its potentially still quite volatile masses. What we are now dealing with in China is a powerful nationalist entity. In retrospect, what Mao's real accomplishment(no small order) was to make China Chinese. If we ever get in a conflict over the lingering issue of Taiwan, it will not be out of the ruling group's desire to bring socialism to the island, but rather motivated by the usual nineteenth century concerns of large empires to hold on and to gain ever more real estate.It may serve the purposes of neo-cons here in the U.S. to allow to linger a mistaken equation between state capitalism and communism in the name of further besmirching that evil philosophy, but for purposes of analysis and understanding it is an equation that obfuscates far more than it elucidates.

Recommend Recommended by 6 Readers

Poll Suggests Opportunities for Both Parties in Midterms
By JEFF ZELENY and MEGAN THEE-BRENAN

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found widespread dissatisfaction with President Obama and voters’ own members of Congress.

201.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 16th, 2010
9:55 am
While, on the one hand, there seems to exist a strong adversarial relationship between the two parties that alternately govern this country, belying the criticism of those who use such terms as Republicrats to describe the flavor of actual governance, it does seem true that most of the adverse behavior comes from just one of the parties. Republicans criticize Democrats strenuously, viscerally sounding alarums--creeping socialism, Europeanization, the destruction of our quaint, uniquely unique exceptionalism--via incantations that are delivered in the colorful local dialects of the regions of the country from which most of this crowd has traveled to Washington. Democrats, for the most part, seem to have chosen to take the high or high-minded ground, not responding in kind. They leave television wags to deal with the inanity of a Sarah Palin, preferring to behave as gentlemen--in spite of John McCain's having played Russian roulette with the country's fate by placing the woman a heartbeat from ruling the most powerful country in the world. They then watch this same individual who they chivalrously avoided criticizing too strenuously, go on to become the spiritual center of something called the Tea Party movement, a group whose behavior conjures up Italian brown shirts more than it does colonial tax protesters in powdered wigs. And, in an almost cosmic display of political chivalry, Democrats basically pass on the opportunity to make even polite observations about the fact that the thirty-year-long regimen of Reaganite policies consumated in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Instead, they allow Republicans to get away with laying blame for the crisis entirely at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and, incidentally, the Democrat currently running for governor here in New York.If, as the Tea folks argue, the American people are angry over the lack of progress being made to end unemployment and get the wheels of industry and commerce going again, Democrats seem to consistently fail to make the observation that the way to make this happen is not via more Republican congressmen, but more Democrats, enough let's say to overcome the present need for super majorities on every significant Senate vote so that policies can be put in place that this newspaper's nobel laureate argues almost daily are the sine qua non for positive change. Such a message must come from the president first of all, but if Democrats were serious about turning around this country's economy, why they should all be out there making stump speeches, speeches that are loud, clear--and frequent.
Recommended Recommended by 2 Readers

Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries
By DAVID STREITFELD

Library Systems & Services was hired to run the libraries of Santa Clarita, Calif., setting off an outsourcing debate.

Display Name
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

If, as a nation, we believe it is acceptable for companies to make a profit providing health care, basic utilities, schooling, soldiers in arms, why not libraries as well? That those profits are taken out of the hides of ordinary working men and women seems of little concern in a land that has come to resemble the hugest casino that ever existed.

Trifecta of Torment
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Republicans are offering a triple whammy to fix the economy: fewer jobs, worse deficits and greater inequality.

159.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
Vincent Amato
New York City
October 7th, 2010
3:20 pm

The enemy of the working class in this country is not the Republican Party or its satellite fringe groups such as the Tea Party crowd. We all know where they stand and whose interests they represent. Unless one subscribes to the notion that there really is only one party and that most Democrats fear creeping socialism or Europeanization as much as their cohorts across the aisle, (in which case, there really is no prospect for change), what we are witnessing is a failure of nerve on the part of the current administration in Washington. The apparent inability or unwillingness to clearly spell out why hand-wringing over deficits and public debt is misplaced during periods of high unemployment and wholesale redistribution of wealth rolls out a red carpet for Republicans such as the current governor of New Jersey whose policy of cuts in social services and recent veto of a large public works program that would have created jobs is allowed to pass as enlightened governance. This paper's Nobel laureate has spelled out--almost daily and in no uncertain terms--why such policies are precisely the wrong policies if we are to turn our economy around. Several of the comments today illustrate that the school of thought that says "let the Republicans win, and after they go down in flames we can pick up the pieces and start again," (always born out of frustration), is being heard again. It was a similar frustration with the policies of the Clinton administration that led to the defeat of the Gore candidacy and gave us eight years of a truly reactionary Bush administration. As the Obama regime currently illustrates, once that happens, it is not so easy to dig ourselves out of the hole Republicans frenziedly dig deeper and deeper. Democrats must take head on the true nature of post-modern Republican policy. Once associated with fiscal conservatism, Republicans learned that the most effective way to destroy social programs is by allowing deficits of such huge dimensions that there is nothing left in the public coffers to fund them. Just as the Kerner Commission warned in 1968 of a future U.S. consisting of two societies--one black, one white--the prevailing tendencies to regressive taxation, regressive entitlements, privatization and debt phobia will create a society of haves and have-nots that will resemble nothing so much as Europe under feudalism.

Recommend Recommended by 95 Readers

My New York Times Journal

2011-03-24T12:45:00.005-04:00

I am going to try to post on this blog site a record of my posts to the New York Times. Most of this writing was done in the heat of the moment and thus is replete with errors of all kinds. The writing was done in full awareness of the fact that there must be a better way to spend one's time, but it will serve, if nothing else, as a chronicle of a certain period in my life. At the end of many of these pieces, one will find a notation as to recommendations by other readers. The number of "recs" often merely reflects the point in the day at which I pasted the piece into my journal. On some occasions, the Times chose not to print my piece at all. Where one does not find recommendations or a number attached to the piece that is why. Now, in chronological order, are the posts:

107.

Vincent Amato
New York City
March 16th, 2010
11:51 pm
The post-New Deal era inaugurated during the Reagan era has many frightening parallels to the post-Reconstruction era following the Civil War. "Big government" is merely a euphemism for any government at all. Such junctures in U.S. history test the very constitutional framework under which we are supposed to live. When, for example, the least democratic branch of our government, the U.S. senate, which gives enormous, one might say, undue power to states with small, perforce conservative populations, is further skewed by an insistence on 60-vote super majorities, the will of the people is in danger of being held hostage by a small minority. The senate's role in the selection of Supreme Court justices further skews its negative impact as has been made clear in recent decisions such as, for example, the decisions on campaign finance reform and a redefinition of eminent domain to extend to private development. We have witnessed many microcosms of Fort Sumter over the last thirty years, and the nation has been held hostage largely because of political timidity in confronting so volatile a policy by the forces of the South and its allies in the less populous western states. Efforts to combat so-called political partisanship are rendered disingenuous by failing to label the growing regional and ideological divide in this nation.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader

228.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 22nd, 2010
8:38 am
While Newt Gingrich's comments are as shocking as they are revelatory of the true cast of much latter-day Republican thinking, (What would Honest Abe think of Newt?), they are entirely in keeping with the substance and tenor of the remarks made by Republicans on the House floor in the closing minutes of debate on the health bill. Minority Whip John Boehner was apoplectic in the face of immanent defeat. Republican rhetoric went far beyond the obvious demagoguery inherent in the argument that the House was not being truly representative since a majority of the American people did not support the bill. (A reference no doubt to polls which include enough respondents who felt the bill did not go far enough to give opponents of the bill a technical majority.) Although he did not pull his carefully coifed hair to emphasize his remarks, Boehner's red-faced cries of socialism and Europeanization were delivered in a manner that hearkened back to the Civil War era when fist fights were common on the House floor. While the bill was called Un-American and vows were made to challenge its constitutionality, Democrats wisely took the high ground and did not respond in kind, choosing rather to point out the bills merits. Nevertheless, contemporary Republican Party rhetoric is deeply troubling--whether it is cast in the mold of barely re-clothed Dixiecrats or the cooler pronouncements of the Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand crowd who seem unbowed by the poverty of their philosophy revealed in the world financial crisis. At some point, the Tea Party types, the thugs who showed up at town meetings on health care and the fanatic fringe of the anti-abortion crowd will need to be confronted more directly. Should their tactics and brand of political "debate" be allowed to go unchallenged, the "comity" that John Boehner pretends to hold as an ideal will be rendered completely impossible.

Recommend Recommended by 11 Readers

Vincent Amato
New York City
March 23rd, 2010
7:30 am

One has to wonder what it will take to check the growing use of near-Brown shirt tactics that are being utilized by the right wing in this country. All Americans should have been tuned in to C-Span’s coverage of the House debate leading up to the vote on health care reform. Unfortunately, I somehow doubt that many were. Had they done so, they would have been treated to the full range of demagoguery in the Republican Party’s arsenal of weapons. Although there was an occasional parliamentary slap of the wrist from the Chair in response to some of the most egregious behavior, Democrats essentially chose to take the high ground, reining in emotion and not responding in kind. This, in spite of the fact that on the right side of the aisle the histrionics came to elicit the pre-Civil War political cartoons of our high school textbooks in which we saw our esteemed representatives depicted brawling, shaking their canes at opponents and taking an occasional punch.Republican rhetoric was not always delivered in hysterical tones. The American political landscape is not so neatly divided by region as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. So while the neatly coifed Southerners resorted to red-faced ranting, finger pointing and prophesies of doom, Republican Northerners, the University of Chicago types, acolytes of Milton Friedman et al., registered their philosophical opposition to any and all checks on the right to make a profit—even at the expense of public health—in more measured, pseudo-academic tones.What was puzzling was an absence of any substantial response from Democrats to either tactic. Was the Democrats’ subdued behavior merely the by-product of knowing they were on the verge of carrying the day? The one recent departure from Democratic restraint was President Obama’s courageous criticism of the sacrosanct Supreme Court’s decision to allow an unchecked flow of corporate funds into mostly Republican coffers. Such distinct criticism was not only uncharacteristic of the man who currently occupies the White House, it has become uncharacteristic of the Party as a whole. Though rare, it was enough to elicit head-shaking disbelief from our esteemed Chief Justice who seemed to smart personally from the remark.Democrats may feel that they need to tamp down the toxic rhetoric and tactics that characterize partisan politics, but there are times when it is dangerous and irresponsible to remain silent.

Vincent Amato
New York City
March 26th, 2010
8:31 am
It took thirty years--almost to the day--for the true character of the men and women who spearheaded the assault on American values initiated in the Reagan era to luridly reveal itself. The greatest danger is to basically agree with the demagogues and thugs, cave in to cynicism and conclude, after all, that the encyclopedic array of sociopathology we are now being exposed to is the "real" America. Instead, it is a dark stratum in American life that has always been with us, the America of vigilante-ism and organizations like the Klan. Barely reconstituted Dixiecrats and the spiritual descendents of Joe McCarthy could pretend to be within the mainstream of American political life while they were having their way, digging us into so deep an economic and social hole that their much despised New Deal liberalism could never again be resurrected, but the election of a Black president, the collapse of the financial house of cards they constructed, the mere impulse to bring about reforms that would place us within the family of civilized nations, have all served to put them over the edge. They are desperate, and, it would be profoundly dangerous to ignore them.

53.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 2nd, 2010
1:03 pm
The list grows--not only of unelected representatives--in this case the unchosen selecting the next unchosen--but of men and women who, by a standard that once prevailed, are barely qualified for public office. New York State may be an egregious example of the phenomenon, but it is certainly not the only case. It is perhaps no mystery that the "best and the brightest" now shy away from elective office, but if the downward trend continues, the crumbling at the foundations of our struggling democracy will be in ever deeper trouble.
Recommend Recommended by 6 Readers

82.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 9th, 2010
7:11 am
Let's see now, what would cause prices to go down in this country? Most Americans are so far removed from what the Great Depression was like that they can't see much harm in prices going down. Nor do they really understand the mechanism by which such a phenomenon could occur. Most Americans worry a great deal about inflation, some even conjuring up images of Weimar Germans rolling wheelbarrows full of Marks to buy a loaf of bread. Most Americans are blind to the "benefits" that inflation can bring. Most Americans wish they could buy lots of gold as a hedge against inflation. (For instruction, many of us might consider the impact on our net wealth of the decline in the value of our homes--a rather obvious instance of deflation.) Yet, unemployment stubbornly lingers, and rather than putting more Americans to work, strapped state governments lay off teachers and other workers, thus further diminishing the aggregate number of robust consumers. Declining sales taxes are one indication that consumers are tightening their belts, and, for a change, saving some cash rather than spending it. In supply and demand terms, even taking into consideration periodic upturns because of inventory depletion of certain goods, the net effect is downward pressure on prices. Lower prices mean less profits, less taxes collected, more businesses closing down, and the dread downward spiral of a market economy dependent on the citizenry spending with relative abandon becomes a frightening reality. In fact, apart from an almost eerily robust stock market that sits on the edge of its seat waiting for a bump from some technological innovation like the i-pad, most of the signs in the real world indicate that the V-shaped recovery we are all waiting for may not occur for a long time. In fact, if the warnings of Paul Krugman and other like-minded economists go unheeded, a deeper V may be lurking in the near future.
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers

582.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 16th, 2010
12:50 pm

This, on the same day that Paul Krugman insists that--in spite of everything--we need to bail out big banks. What Paul Krugman doesn't understand is that it is precisely such calls that fuel another fire, the so-called Tea Party rebellion. When banks that are "too big to fail" are threatened with failure, the only immediate response of government should be to nationalize them and then dispose of their assets as makes the most sense for the majority of tax payers rather than the same arrogant manipulators that got us where we are in the first place. Krugman and politicians of like mind may heave big sighs of exasperation at the lowly layman's lack of sophistication, but the lowly layman isn't stupid. We lowly laymen out here are just waiting fo the other shoe to drop. A jobless recovery that is celebrated only on Wall Street doesn't begin to address the need for deep reform.
Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers

33.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 24th, 2010
3:07 pm
Laying teachers off based on some measure of performance rather than seniority is a very bad idea. There are obviously forces that find the teachers' union too powerful and find the notion of teacher tenure outdated. We see echoes of this in last week's news about "rubber rooms" and Florida's toying with doing away with tenure. From the point of view of the UFT, all tenured teachers are equal and are to be treated equally. That core concept grows out of the fact that, in order to win tenure, a prospective teacher must have the appropriate university training, the appropriate courses in education, pass a licensing exam, and, perhaps most crucially, survive a three-year long probationary period. The forces that want to do away with tenure in effect want to find a way to buy good teaching on the cheap, and there is really no way to do that. Any serious program of improving the quality of teachers and guarding against keeping individuals in our classrooms who would be better off pursuing some other vocation must aim at investing in the crucial stages of the process leading up to tenure. More needs to be spent on teacher education, licensing exams must test for the appropriate skills, and the probationary period must have not just real rigor, but real and intensive support for the teacher-in-training. There are far too many variables completely outside of the control of the individual classroom teacher to make anything approaching a fair evaluation of merit and far too many opportunities for administrators or school districts with their own agendas to treat teachers unfairly. Tenure is a right and an honor that needs to be maintained within the profession.
Recommend Recommended by 32 Readers

Vincent Amato
New York City
April 26th, 2010
6:34 pm
First, a \"super minority\" blocks legislation and debate that a clear majority of the American people favor; they then go on to argue disingenuously, illogically, that they are the true representatives of the people. What makes this spectacle even more frustrating and alarming is that they further argue that since the Democratic majority is out of touch with popular sentiment, more Republicans need to be elected in the November elections. What this pattern clearly calls for is a rededication of the Democratic Party leadership which seems strangely stoic in the face of this strategy. The party should be enforcing discipline among so-called Blue Dogs and putting out the call to voters that what the last year has proven is that President Obama's vision can only be realized by increasing Democratic margins. If the president and the party have been ineffectual, it is because they have been forced to decide between compromise and getting nothing at all done. It would only take a few more House and Senate Democrats elected to Congress to finally address the many urgent needs that thirty years of good government under siege has wrought.

Vincent Amato
New York City
May 12th, 2010
11:38 am
From Pete Peterson on down, the writing is on the wall, viz., \"austerity\" programs for the working classes, the destruction of all unions, the end of all pension programs, the further privatization of functions long seen as falling within the province of governments. The outrage that is expressed wholesale in the media toward the alleged greed of public sector employees and the unions which represent them is far more intense than anything expressed toward the one percent of the population in this country and others which has sequestered the lion's share of the common wealth. And yet, in the midst of this firestorm of propaganda, I find myself focusing on some of the small things, like the fact exposed in the film \"Food, Inc.\" that where once the FDA here in the U.S. had 5,000 inspectors, it now has 700, and we are in danger of being poisoned by the meat and poultry we consume. There are seemingly infinite examples of how deregulation and unfettered business practices endanger us and the planet we live on. The fractal array of these factoids add up to a system which is in grave crisis. Since we seem no longer to fear a threat from socialistic thinking, one has to wonder why reason should not prevail. A world-wide regimen of progressive taxation seems a good place to start.

16.
Vincent Amato
New York City
May 18th, 2010
10:11 am
Last week one of the PBS television stations played a documentary about John Lindsay's career as mayor. The program served as a chilling reminder of the turmoil that was taking place during that period. I was a twenty-three year-old teacher in a Bedford-Stuyvesant junior high school when Lindsay first took office in 1966. Like many of my generation, I was felt myself both a witness to and a participant in the historic events taking place during that period. As is your usual wont, you take a spin on history that does not fit the reality, but instead subtly implies that it is the--what shall we call it--restoration? counter-revolution? that we have lived with since the inception of the Reagan administration has vastly improved our lives. Yes, calm has been restored. Beyond mere calm, what we seem presently to have is a catatonic state. Few Americans, perhaps particularly few New Yorkers would choose to return to a period marked by assassinations, urban insurrections, high crime rates, three-month long school strikes and urban decay. Yet, in the midst of all of that turmoil, there was hope for a better future. Instead, our society (and that includes all of us) settled. Out of frustration and weariness, we replaced that hope with ceaseless nesting, the quest for a comfort zone based on acquiring things. Money rules. The poor are still with us, our society is more racially segregated here in the North than the old South once was, and we drug ourselves, when it isn't with actual phramaceuticals, with the endless entertainments and distractions from a reality we once dreamed would be very different.
Recommend Recommended by 30 Readers

59.
Vincent Amato
New York City
May 20th, 2010
1:04 pm
The current wisdom that Paul Ehrlich's prediction of a devastating population explosion was wrong (merely because the application of ammonium nitrate to our soils allowed us to feed teeming billions) is one of the great lies of the period we live in. As has been documented from just about every perspective of late, our planet simply cannot sustain current populations let alone rationally prepare for another three billion or so. Moreover, in the literature of the NPOs and NGOs, it has become at best politically incorrect, even taboo, to call for population control measures. The only real check on rising birth rates is a rising standard of living; thus the problem aggregates in the poorest countries and calls for birth control even have to bear the disingenuous onus of racism. In the 1960s, what gets summarized in the narrative as "the pill" frightened conservatives because it attacked a core tenet of their belief systems, namely, that human beings could have some control over their own lives. So long as we delay addressing this problem, we live with the constant threat of over-fishing, over-farming, over-deforestation on the one hand, and worst of all, a deep decline in the quality of life for all the planet's inhabitants. As usual, what keeps us from acknowledging and attempting to reverse the current global population trend are the billions of dollars that the trend puts into the coffers of just a few of us Earthlings.
Recommended Recommended by 1 Reader

45.
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 1st, 2010
9:51 am

It is we, the American people, who must ultimately bear responsibility for each ratcheting up of state terror as the Israeli modus operandi. It is the de facto silence of U.S. policy makers--where it is not our suspected outright sponsorship or encouragement--that gives extremists in Israel carte blanche to carry out such operations. Israel almost casually ignores all international law, receives the opprobrium of the nations of the world, and gets support from the U.S. alone. The sparks fly ever closer to the Middle East powder keg, and when the blowback inevitably occurs, we will, just as inevitably, blame the victims.
Recommend Recommended by 60 Readers

135.
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 4th, 2010
1:06 pm
Just to take the long view for a moment in order to respond to yet another conservative riff on the superiority of profit-driven private enterprise over government programs. Looking back, it appears that one of the worst coincidences in modern history was the election in both England and America of conservative leaders at the very time that the old Soviet Union was falling apart. The way we and the English tell the story, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher brought down the communist regimes almost single-handedly. While both leaders were elected out of desperation by respective electorates driven by exhaustion and fear at the end of the 1970s, and "saved" their nations by attacks on the working class and redistributing wealth to the richest of their citizens, initiating a series of unsustainable bubbles to do so, the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself, giving up the faith with only a random shot or two being fired. Conservatives chose to celebrate the occasion as an almost divinely inspired sign of the superiority of Western laissez-faire policies. Yet, in the years since 1989, the West, now free from the threat or interference of an opposing economic ideology, has used its newfound freedom to limp from one crisis to another. Faced with one embarrassing economic debacle after another, and with no evil empire to blame, conservatives employ the only tactic available to them, namely, to turn their verbal assaults on such dread domestic enemies as teachers' unions whom they portray as remnants of now moribund socialistic institutions. Not even the 2008 financial collapse or the mischief of an oil giant like BP can shake their faith in the superiority of unregulated, unchecked profiteering, since, after all, there really is no alternative. "Look what happened to the Soviet Union," they mutter sotto voce. And they profess to be subtle in their thinking.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader

Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

While the New York Times and other U.S. media may rush to bury the story of Israel's massacre on the high seas, there are millions around the world who cannot shake their outrage at this incident. While yours, Mr. Cohen, is a thoughtful piece, it does not begin to deal with the scale of the crime committed and therefore seems more than a bit detached from reality. Israeli behavior gives new, darkly grim meaning to the term overkill, sometimes referred to as its asymmetrical responses to perceived threats. Israel presently behaves like the murderer who doesn't hesitate to murder again since one can only be executed for the crime once. Policies born of such thinking can only grow more and more deeply immoral. The fact that this kind of arrogant bullying only takes place because the state of Israel feels immune to sanctions from its greatest benefactor may contain the seeds of its own downfall. More and more Americans want to distance themselves from such behavior, more and more Americans are reflecting on the fact that it is their tax dollars that are contributing to this nightmare.

3
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 18th, 2010
12:53 am
Although difficult to assert without seeming to have some political axe to grind, I would argue, Dr. Krugman, that what we are seeing is the beginning of the demise of capitalism as we have known it. Just as soviet-style socialism seemed an abysmal failure and eventually imploded, capitalism simply can no longer function as it once did. Why this is so is an interesting question. What is fairly clear is that all of the tweaking of the dials that has taken place since the end of the brief period of rising standards of living at least in the advanced nations after the end of WWII are no longer effective. Going off the gold standard, the intentional destruction of the union movement, the demise of rational funding for all variety of social welfare funding, the give away to the rich (in the perhaps disingenous hope of a trickle down effect, outsourcing of manufacturing to nations where wages were (repeat, were) a mere fraction of what workers once could commnand in the advanced nations--none of these has had much of an effective life span. I do not believe that anything sinister is going on here. The liberal democracies have just run out of any solution they can imagine allowing to be put in place. This is now a global crisis that, to power an unpleasant word from another venue, will undoubtedly require major restructuring. It appears we will have to wait until things get worse, much worse, unfortunately, until we see whether the traditional capitalists will go down as the soviets did, that is, without a shot being fired.
Recommend Recommended by 135 Readers

With a Nod to Emily Post

2011-01-14T00:32:00.005-05:00

I watched New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's State of the State message and found that, in keeping with the Orwellian nature of our time, almost unfathomable vacuity was greeted by uproarious applause. True, most of the applause came from his fellow Republicans, but the volume and duration of the hand-clapping and deep-throated roars of approval from his party cohorts easily lent the impression that he had the unanimous approval of his audience. Now, the man stands for basically nothing, but he puts his emptiness out there with such fire and conviction that, if you blinked, you might be deluded into thinking that he is driven by deep moral urges. His speech contained no surprises, just repetition of the Big Lie of our historical moment, namely, that the answer to all of or problems lies in frugal governance, a goal our nation has apparently been thwarted from attaining by school teachers, a lazy, incompetent and greedy lot collecting fat paychecks and even fatter pensions. I soon had the chilling realization that this guy is so good at this act that he will almost undoubtedly be his party's candidate for the presidency, and, barring some unforeseeable change in the political climate, there should be a Christie in the oval office in January of 2013.

The notion that the fat in teachers' wages and pensions, (and, yes, feel free to throw in the excesses of other such recalcitrant unionists as cops and fire fighters), constitutes enough cash to make a significant dent in the trillions of dollars of debt that thirty years of rule by the acolytes of Milton Friedman left this country with is a notion that anyone with a decent education should be able to see through in a New York minute. Oh, but wait a minute, the reason so few Americans are decently educated is all those guys and gals with the chalk on their fingers just going through the motions until their pension checks can be forwarded to the French Riviera. Any way you look at it, school teachers are to blame for all of our ills.

Well, what can you expect from a Republican, right? Umm... Then I realized that just a few days earlier, I had heard a remarkably similar argument made in the inauguration speech of none other than a man whose Democratic Party credentials are unimpeachable. Young Andrew Cuomo, fruit of the loins of Liberal Saint Mario, had also railed against teachers, decried the unions that represent them, made belt-tightening and austerity budgets sound as if they were mandates posted to the church doors by some divinely inspired reformer. A phallic finger punctuating his every point, an incantatory delivery the rhythm of which was only a little undercut by his resorting to a slide show, Cuomo, like Christie, did his magic and made something out of nothing. Addressing himself to the needs of a state legislature considered just a little less dysfunctional than that of Mississippi's and recently instructed in democracy by a woman abuser and an indicted felon, he let us know in no uncertain terms that he would bang heads together, lock the good lawmakers in a room if necessary, if that's what it took to have them get his program of union-busting and cuts to already grossly underfunded social programs in full gear.

And then, spinning ever deeper into the vortex as I listened to Governor Christie, echoes of President Obama's commission on budget reform assaulted me. Why, they were all reading from the same text! Too much the Harvard man to attack directly the very people who helped elect him in the first place, (those tenured, over-indulged teachers working three-hour days only ten months a year), his two-pronged cure for the national malaise added a call for charter schools to the cry for cuts, austerity, belt-tightening, etc.

A few days later, news came out of that Athens of the Southwest, the proud state of Arizona, home to the senator who gave us Sarah Palin, that yet another deranged mass murderer had crawled out of our deeply troubled ethos, this time instructed to count among his many victims a member of congress, a federal judge and a nine year-old girl. I steeled myself against the prospect of the "analysis" that inevitably accompanies these all too frequent tragic events. No amount of preparation, however, would prove adequate to keeping me from the despair brought on by the reality of the rhetoric that began to flow.

Oh, the cries for restraint, for civility, for a courtly spirit of compromise! Like a drowning man, all of the many events that should have prompted an impassioned response from the robot in the White House came in on me like a tsunami. When Tea Party thugs were shouting down revered political leaders, resorting to essentially brown-shirt methods, why was our most eloquent president not throwing a log on the fire and chatting with us via our HD-TV sets calmly explaining the dangers of such methods? Instead of fireside chats, we got silence or occasional platitudes. No passion. No attempt to educate, to lead. President Obama had compromised away the public option in health care. In that same spirit, he had allowed, during a period when many Americans were out of work or watching their standard of living deteriorate, a budget compromise that gave tax advantages to millionaires and billionaires in the full knowledge that there would be no "trickle down" to the commoners. He never lost his cool, always driving home his core belief that one had to work with the other side. He is too circumspect to often resort to the Christie/Cuomo finger jab.

Now, it appears, the savagery that took place in Tucson will be used to further calls for compromise, for courtliness, for conciliation. When, in the presidential election of 2012, Republican nominee Christie runs against Democratic nominee Cuomo, we will have achieved the ultimate in political politesse--complete agreement.

The Stolen Chinese Vase

2010-11-13T09:37:00.004-05:00

"Ms. Porter said the sellers had no knowledge of how the vase came to be in their parents’ possession, although they believed it had been in the family since the 1930s. One theory, according to Ivan Macquisten, the editor of Antiques Trade Gazette, a British magazine, was that it could have been among the treasures looted by British troops when they sacked the imperial palaces in Beijing during the second Opium War, from 1856 to 1860."

"Qing Dynasty Relic Yields Record Price at Auction," New York Times, November 12, 2010

I am not sure whether we should be outraged--or just amused--at the sale of a Chinese vase (an estimated 89.5 million dollars) that was part of the "loot" taken by the British during the Opium Wars. Students of Chinese history are well versed in the endless tales of precious art and artifacts being stolen from China and ending up in Europe and America either in museums, or on someone's mantle or just stashed in an attic.
If Greece were as rich as China, we might see similar bids coming out of Athens to effect the return of what the world now calls "the Elgin marbles." That the Parthenon, the greatest icon of Western Civilization, remains bereft of its frieze statuary as a result of what can only be seen as outright theft by an English lord, an individual who, like many in the Anglo-American world, no doubt saw himself as a natural heir to the Greco-Roman legacy, is just one small example of the lèse majesté those of us living in the lands of the conquerors take for granted.

I shall never forget my experience upon first visiting the British Museum in the late 1960s of just happening upon the great horse's head that was once part of the Parthenon. In those days, if memory serves, the piece was more or less absent-mindedly placed in a rather dark and dusty stairwell leading to one of the galleries. It was a breath-taking experience. At that point in my life, I will confess to having been completely unaware of the history of what had led to pieces of the Parthenon being essentially stashed in London. I had never heard the term "Elgin Marbles." On the other hand, my recent liberal education had filled me with respect, awe, even affection for ancient Greek art and literature. Coming upon the frieze itself was a profoundly stirring experience. To stand before the sinewy arm of Apollo rearing his steed out of the ocean depths to steer the sun across the arc of the sky brought to life thousands of mere words upon the pages of books. "Why is this here?" I wondered.

That experience was life-changing in more ways than one. It helped me to understand the power of great art, the power of great ideas to inspire great art and of the incredible human faculties that can be unleashed in us when we are so inspired. Mankind at its best, one might say. Very elevating. Very depressing, on the other hand, was the feeling that almost simultaneously arose in me that our most venerated museums can be seen as huge warehouses of stolen artifacts.

More recently in my life, during the early 2000s, I came to make several trips to China. Up until those visits my interest in China was primarily historical and political in nature. Making and preparing for those trips set me upon a period of doing more reading in the subject. As a visiting fellow with an educators' tour sponsored by the China Society, (located here in New York in a town house of East 65th Street), I was taken to Dunhuang to visit the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. If Apollo's sinewy arm had set my mind reeling, I experienced no less a reaction to the incredible Buddhist art work contained in the many caves of Dunhuang. Yet, that experience, too, ended up being both intensely inspirational and depressing at the same time.

By this time, I had read histories of the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion replete with tales of the good wives of British officers taking off bolts of precious silks and of soldiers throwing precious golden artifacts out of windows onto the grounds of the Summer Palace thinking that artifacts in such numbers were surely common brass rather than precious gold. I had even been shocked to learn that my ostensible benefactor, the somewhat stodgily respectable China Institute itself, owed its very existence to still extant reparations payments paid by the Chinese for its "crimes" during the Boxer Rebellion.

Now, as I circulated through the caves with my colleagues, I became witness to the very real emotional impact that the "removal" of a national heritage can have upon the people who suffer such losses. "Stolen!" came the cry of our young curator as he pointed to various spaces on the cave walls where ancient frescoes has been peeled off and sent via camel caravans and railways to the various European capitals. For this young man, the intersect between the politics of imperialism and a nation's art was not just a subject for an elective in an art history program. He took it personally.

The experience led me to read Peter Hopkirk's great work, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, which chronicles the extent to which Westerners felt entitled to just walk off with an unwary or powerless nation's treasures. In the process of telling his story, Hopkirk also lets us in on the many debates that have taken place around the subject. A common argument is that we, that is enlightened Westerners, are just better at caring for such objects. This argument gained some ammuniton not long ago when the Taliban in Afgahanistan destroyed two enormous ancient Buddhas citing them as "idolatrous and anti-Islamic." Those who make the argument choose, on the other hand, not to mention the many works of art "safely" secured in Western museums that were destroyed in bombing raids during the second world war. It has to be admitted that there can be little doubt that ideologues can be as dangerous for art works as thieves or poor preservation, but it is hard to see how anyone gets a free ride in this debate.

So we are now faced with the prospect of the Chinese buying back just one such object. Perhaps, in a sane world, the Porters would just have given the piece back to its proper owners, just as the English might begin crating the Parthenon's statuary free of charge and flying it back in a cargo plane on the next available flight. What that little vase seems to represent now, however, is that China, after years of being victimized by Western powers, followed by a dalliance with socialism that, in terms of its long history, lasted no longer than the blink of an eye, has now come fully to terms with the ruling axiom of our global historical moment: money talks.

Am I Bitter? You Bet I Am!

2010-11-03T21:56:00.003-04:00

I am proud of having once found myself making the observation that "the United States without New York City is basically Australia." Now that we have the election results in for the 2o10 mid-term elections, I may have to modify that--we are basically Australia even with New York City. Why is anyone surprised? Why all the musings and head-scratching by media commentators over how to explain the Republican wave and the success of the lunatic fringe Tea Party? That, my friends, is who we are. The U.S. has two cousins, the lasting inheritance of British colonialism, namely, South Africa and Australia. We are really more alike than most anyone will acknowledge: two former slave states and a continental island nation that still subjugates what it calls its aboriginal population. Prior to his death a short time ago, during a talk at the 92nd Street Y, the writer Norman Mailer was asked to account for the behavior of the American people during the Bush era. "Fifty percent of the American people are stupid," was his knee-jerk response. Well, with all due respect for Norman, I disagree. It's not about intelligence; it's about ingrained attitudes, what some proudly point to as "American exceptionalism."

Take a whirlwind tour through U.S. history and you will find that in the 221 years since our constitution was ratified, there have really been only two critical junctures--the Civil War and the Great Depression. Two instances when the country was basically forced into change. In both cases, capitalism was just barely saved from, in the first instance, the spread of a plantation, latifundia culture that would have left the country looking more like a banana republic than a modern nation state, and, in the second instance, the prospect of the country going either fascist or communist. In Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the nation produced two leaders who to this very day are vilified wholesale by American reactionaries as traitors to the true American spirit, yet both men saved America for its unique brand of capitalism. And, if one reflects a bit more deeply, what will also emerge from the effort is that the period of the Civil War and the New Deal were the single, singular episodes of anything resembling radical change in the landscape of the nation. Some may believe I am overlooking the tumult of the 1960s with its anti-war, civil and women's rights rebellions, but rebellions they were, distinct from the far deeper changes that took place in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter were martialed by two presidents; the one attempt at a electing a spiritual leader to oversee change in the 1960s, George McGovern, resulted in an historic landslide defeat. He lost every state but Massachusetts.

The bottom line? For all but two or three decades of its history, this country has been a bastion of laissez-faire capitalism and private ownership more resembling a plutocracy than a democracy. Its permanent status as such is carefully nurtured by a homegrown aristocracy pulling strings behind closed doors, fiercely dedicated to protecting its ever-growing hoard of wealth and privilege and taking full advantage of the availability of an almost endless resource of more visible troops among Southern racists, religious fundamentalists, orthdox Catholics, orthodox Jews, strivers and social climbers as well as virulently anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-social democrat immigrants here to finally "make it." Unfortunately, they are not stupid. On the contrary, they are intelligent adherents to their doctrine, their gospel, of wealth and of the promise of privilege.

Still by far the richest nation on Earth, with its 14 trillion dollar annual GDP, equal to the sum of the GDPs of the next three richest economies, the much feared China as well as Japan's and Germany's, (the latter two still hosting huge U.S. military bases). Moreover, its influence far exceeds what mere numbers can reveal. The U.S. economy now serves as a model for the world's economies. Over the coming months, we will be treated to speeches from an endless series of Cassandras warning us about the dangers of deficits and national debt. Now, as recent big-spender Republican administrations have clearly demonstrated, Republicans have no problem with debts and deficits, so long, that is, as those funds are not expended on social programs. They will attempt to club to death the few remaining unions, (here, too, a contradiction, they loved unions in Poland under Lech Walesa), crowbar open the treasure chests of the few remaining pension funds, and go on a Klan raid of privatization, privatizing everything in their path--from prisons, to schools and libraries, to the military, to the very air we breathe. A pay-as-you-go and a dog-eat-dog universe, since they will also attempt to dry up the funds of all regulatory agencies, particularly the SEC, recently given new power--and a new budget--by our floundering would-be savior in the White House.

We got our short-lived consolation prize in the form of the young President Obama for enduring the eight years of outrages in the previous administration. Turns out it was just an apology note, but its perfume has already dissipated, and now we stuff the note in a drawer and resume business as usual. Good night, and God bless America.

Lyndon Johnson's 1964 World's Fair Prophesies

2010-10-22T05:04:00.006-04:00

For those of us of a certain age, it seems difficult to believe that it has been nearly fifty years since the last world's fair took place here in New York City. It was 46 years ago, to be exact, that President Lyndon Johnson arrived in Flushing, Queens to deliver a speech on the fair's opening day, April 22, 1964. It had been six months--to the day--since Johnson had been thrust into the presidency upon the assassination of President Kennedy. The country was still in mourning, and the early days of the Johnson administration had largely been devoted to restoring confidence and some optimism to a people still grieving and still in shock.

A time would come, in the not too distant future, when Johnson would not be able to appear in New York City without thousands of anti-war protesters greeting him with the chilling chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?", but that still lay ahead. It was a sad honeymoon period in the Johnson presidency, but compared to what would come later, a honeymoon it was. Still ahead, too, was the 1964 election in which the prospect of a President Barry Goldwater would so frighten the American people that Johnson would finally take office in his own right with one of the greatest landslides in the history of American presidential elections. And thus, the time was ideal, on a blustery spring morning on the plains of Flushing Meadow Park, for Johnson to make an inspirational speech.

I watched the speech earlier in the evening on City Classics, a television show that goes into the city's archives and takes a look at its past history, and I was struck as much by what Johnson got right in his stab at prophecy as what he got wrong. It was natural for Johnson, a product of New Deal liberalism and an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt, to turn with some pride to what the nation had achieved since the previous World's Fair held in New York City in 1939, a year in which the U.S. was still suffering through the Depression but beginning to look ahead to better times:

The last time New York had a World's fair, we also tried to predict the future. A daring exhibit proclaimed that in the 1960's it would really be possible to cross the country in less than 24 hours, flying as high as 10,000 feet; that an astounding 38 million cars would cross our highways. There was no mention of outer space, or atomic power, or wonder drugs that could destroy disease.

These were bold prophecies back there in 1939. But, again, the reality has far outstripped the vision.

Now it was Johnson's turn at the role of prophet, and, as he peered into the future, he said:

I prophesy peace is not only possible in our generation, I predict that it is coming much earlier. If I am right, then at the next world's fair, people will see an America as different from today as we are different from 1939.

They will see an America in which no man must be poor.

They will see an America in which no man is handicapped by the color of his skin or the nature of his belief--and no man will be discriminated against because of the church he attends or the country of his ancestors.

They will see an America which is solving the growing problems of crowded cities, inadequate education, deteriorating national resources and decreasing national beauty.

They will see an America concerned with the quality of American life--unwilling to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction--concerned not only that people have more, but that people shall have the best.

Although no new world's fair is currently scheduled to take place here in New York, now, half a century later, we can take stock of just how well President Johnson did in his role as a prophet. The reader may share with me a certain chill at the accuracy of his first sentence: "I prophesy peace is not only possible in our generation, I predict that it is coming much earlier." Johnson, of course, had no way of being able to foresee wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, and even if he had the ability to do so, would have considered such adventures far less significant than the over-riding concern for his generation of post World War II politicans, the Cold War with the Soviet Union. It would be exactly 50 years after the 1939 World's Fair took place that the Berlin Wall would come down, soon taking with it the entire structure of Soviet communism, and hopefully the threat of a global nuclear holocaust. Whether a product of optimism or genuine political insight, in this first prediction, Johnson amazingly got it right.

In just the brief moment in which we have to celebrate this bit of political perspicacity, however, a far different mood begins to emerge upon his uttering the very next sentence: "If I am right, then at the next world's fair, people will see an America as different from today as we are different from 1939." Listening to the speech in 1964, an audience might well have concluded, (as many did after the fall of the Soviet Union), that the differences one would see in such an America would all be positive, that there would be enormous post cold war "peace dividends." Instead, in the light of what has actually taken place since 1989, Johnson's next predictions have a truly tragic resonance.

"They will see an America in which no man must be poor."

The president who would come to initiate the "War on Poverty" during his tenure almost fifty years ago might be surprised to find that, according to the Census Bureau, one in five American children live in poverty, precisely the same number that existed while he was in office, and that, in 2009, the number of Americans living in poverty rose to an estimated 43.6 million.

"They will see an America in which no man is handicapped by the color of his skin..."

The president who, just four months after this speech would sign the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law and, a year later, sign the Voting Rights Act, might well take pride in the truly revolutionary changes that have taken place in the lives of Black Americans. That a Black man would be elected president in 2008 might both surprise and be a source of intense pride. Nevertheless, a nation in which "no man is handicapped by the color of his skin" remains an as yet unrealized (and, according to some pessimists, a systemically impossible) goal. Furthermore, the deep divisions that the '64 and '65 civil rights legislation engendered continue to play havoc not merely with the prospects for racial harmony and integration, (the Kerner Commission's own prophesy of "two societies, one white and one black--separate and unequal" having been largely realized), but have evolved into a "red states, blue states" dichotomy that, while there is a constant undercurrent of race, has taken on the characteristics of a far broader and deeper, almost theological schism.

"...or the nature of his belief--and no man will be discriminated against because of the church he attends or the country of his ancestors."

On this score, Johnson can certainly be forgiven his lack of foresight since it would be hard to find even a single American who, in 1964, could have foreseen the era of Islamophobia, "Islamofascists" and the mere possibility of a debate about locating a Muslim house of worship on a particular piece of real estate. It would probably be indelicate even to speculate on the images that the word "Muslim" conjured up in the citizenry of 1964. "Gobalization" as we now know it was more the stuff of science fiction novels than a real prospect for the near future.

"They will see an America which is solving the growing problems of crowded cities, inadequate education, deteriorating national resources and decreasing national beauty."

Here, too, the pace of progress has been disappointing--to put it mildly. For a while it seemed that our nation was going in the direction not of crowded but of depopulated cities, depopulated by the aftermath of "burn, baby, burn," white flight to the suburbs, a spreading rust belt and red-lining by the worlds of banking and finance. One may no longer see the word "ghetto" in print, its having been replaced by the euphemistic "inner-city" jargon, but the ghettos are still there. Little progress has been made in education reform, and black children in Northern ghettos are now more segregated than their brothers and sisters in the schools of the former Confederacy. In spite of the greatest accumulation of wealth in human history, the multi-billionaires of our own era seem not to have the propensity for building libraries and museums that the so-called "robber barons" of the past bestowed upon urban centers in the past, most American cities now having been abandoned for all-white enclaves and gated communities on what was not so long ago farm land. The preoccupation of President Johnson's wife, "Lady Bird" Johnson, with highway beautification now seems quaint, her desire to "leave this splendor for our grandchildren" a piquant historical artifact in an era of profound decay of infrastructure.

"They will see an America concerned with the quality of American life--unwilling to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction--concerned not only that people have more, but that people shall have the best." (Bold mine.)

It is here, in President Johnson's final prophesy, that we find the key, the very essence of why so much that his speech looks forward to has failed to be realized. While his speech must be credited with having alluded to this core understanding of how a "great society" is maintained and developed, tragically, the nation has proven itself all too willing "to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction." It is our willingness to accept public deprivation that explains the absence of public transportation, health, housing and education standards that the rest of what we proudly call the "civilized world" takes for granted. The New Deal liberalism that produced Lyndon Johnson's public philosophy has now been subsumed under the rhetoric of creeping socialism and dread Europeanization. The prevailing philosophy of the post-modern United States, antithetical to the naive utopianism of both old world philosophies and the hopeful optimism that prevailed at both the 1939 and 1964 world's fairs has resulted in a land resembling Brecht's Mahogonny, a land dominated by what another European writer, the Englishman Thomas Carlyle, in 1839 described as "the cash nexus." "You get what you pay for," Mr. and Mrs. America. No state subsidized bullet trains for us, no national health insurance, no adequately funded public schools. A nation not merely of two races--separate and unequal, but of two classes--separate and unequal: the very, very rich and the rest of us.

Republican Rule: Not 30 Years, But 40

2010-09-21T09:38:00.028-04:00

On the liberal side, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, we are now accustomed to sentences beginning with the phrase, "After thirty years of Republican rule...". I have done it myself. Many times. And it is convenient enough to see in the Reagan administration the beginning of our descent into a society bereft of reforms inaugurated with the period of the New Deal. The reality is that the political pendulum began to swing to the right with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and has never really changed direction in the ensuing years--in spite of the election of two Democratic presidents. In so many ways, 1968 more than earned its designation as "the year the world ended."

By the end of the Johnson administration, the cultural aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the war in Vietnam and what we euphemistically call the Civil Rights movement had so thrown the American landscape into near anarchy that even Walter Lippman, the revered liberal lion of journalism, was calling for a Nixon victory and the restoration of "law and order." Racial polarization transformed Southern Dixiecrats into Southern Republicans who would gradually gain more and more power. In the North, the white working class increasingly distanced itself from the Democratic Party until their ultimate transformation into Reagan Democrats, and they have never gone back.

Nixon's counter-revolution, though mild when compared to what would be initiated during the Reagan era, was nevertheless odious enough, in combination with his overt and covert conduct of the war in Vietnam, to make him the victim of an expiatory exercise that is subsumed under the label of Watergate. After Nixon was forced out of the White House, Gerald Ford, Nixon's Vice-President, became president and Nelson Rockefeller was placed a heartbeat from the oval office. Ford was essentially a caretaker president. A trusted apparatchik of the nation's permanent government who had served on the Warren Commission investigating the murder of President Kennedy, Ford, who probably knew as many of our state secrets as any man alive, was portrayed in the media as a pipe-smoking, comfortable figure who provided comic relief by stumbling off airplanes. Just folks. Non-threatening. The tarnish of the Nixon administration never quite wore off Ford though, particularly when he pardoned his erstwhile superior early on in his administration. That decision no doubt played a role in opening the door to a switch to the Democratic Party in the figure of a truly unique American politician, a part-time peanut farmer from Georgia, a president the country felt comfortable calling "Jimmy."

James Earl Carter, Jr. was not your typical peanut farmer, however. Governor of his state, a naval officer, a nuclear physicist and a Southern Baptist minister, during his candidacy he had his hair coiffed into a Kennedy-esque forelock that he often brushed aside with one finger, campaigned on a platform of what amounted to moral rearmament, and defeated Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford. His was not a happy time in office, however. Carter's tendency to Protestant preachiness did not help an administration plagued by high interest rates, Americans taken hostage in Iran, an energy crisis that saw long lines of drivers waiting to fill their gas tanks, and his own televised pleas to have us all turn off our lights and electrical appliances. Depressing. We will look more closely at the man and his presidency later, a man whose beatification now rests on his association with Habitat for Humanity, his criticism of Israeli imposed apartheid in the occupied Palestinian lands and an alleged penchant for refreshing candor.

Americans like full gas tanks and well-lit homes. And thus the unthinkable occurred. In the presidential election of 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in his run for a second term and became president of the United States. It is with Reagan's taking office that most current accounts date the beginning of the true counter-revolution, the gradual, seemingly inexorable destruction, one by one, of the gains made by working class Americans through the greater part of the twentieth century. Exorcise those images of UAW workers battling police and being shot down, of kids in the CCC, artists in the WPA, bank regulations, the struggle for social security. Regulations were torn up, often by the very individuals appointed to the various commissions to execute those regulations. The demise of the union movement that began with Reagan's firing striking air-traffic controllers continues its downward slide to this day. White Protestant Southerners and White Catholic Northerners made an unholy alliance motivated largely by racial fears (when not actual racial hatred) and decided to barter their hard-won gains for a tacit agreement that their prerogatives, nebulous and ill-defined as they have been and still are, would not be traded away. By 1968, in another expiatory exercise, a commission was formed to look into the causes of the race riots that had destroyed literally thousands of American cities. Famously, (though currently seemingly forgotten), the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, or Kerner Report, found that:

"Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—-separate and unequal."

In the almost unbelievably short twelve-year period since the report had been issued, the transformation into two societies was realized. Once thriving American cities like Newark, New Jersey, cities that were by European standards just babies that had only begun to grow in the 1920s, were now, a mere forty years later, abandoned wholesale by their former white citizens. White flight transformed the American landscape into two sectors--white suburbs with their sprawling tract housing, malls and parking lots, and abandoned "inner cities" inhabited by black and brown citizens living beyond the protective moats of remnant silk-stocking enclaves. The phenomenon was not restricted to the nation's smaller cities. Detroit was left in ruins, and, for a while, in the 1970s, it seemed even New York, the vaunted capital of world finance (and some would say, the world) looked as if it would crumble into decay.

In spite of being a mean-spirited, Byzantinely complex man who seemed to have equal distaste for redwood trees, college students, unions and commies, Ronald Reagan truly earned his title of "great communicator" and the resultant sainthood bestowed upon him by American conservatives. Schooled as a film actor in "B" movies, he went on to host a television show in which he served as spokesman and lobbyist for General Electric ("Progress is our most important product."). To a national constituency thirsting, hungering, for reassurance that the life style that had prevailed concurrent with his reign as television host in the 1950s (the golden age of the American Dream) could somehow be restored, his message was loud and clear. Stick with me and I will dispatch the commies, the students, the urban rioters, the unions and all that socialist legislation that gave us the time of troubles we have endured. It may cost you a little, but I will make it worth your while.

As it turned out, fate and the inexorable wheels of economic change were on Reagan's side. For many, it was never really about race--it was about the class struggle. That class struggle obviously had its manifestations outside of the United States as well. The world economy had evolved to a juncture that saw the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev across the Atlantic, in their realms just as pressed as Reagan was here to save their kingdoms via counter-insurgencies. By the time Thatcher had torn up the social contract in Great Britain and perestroika and glasnost had run their course in the USSR, Ronald Reagan, conveniently addled by Alzheimer's during inquiries into his role in the blatantly unconstitutional Iran-Contra capers, could comfortably witness the handing over of power to his Vice-President, George Bush.

No one was truly prepared for the demise of the Soviet Union, least of all, it seems, the one-time CIA operative who occupied the Oval Office during those historic events. (With the possible exception of one writer for a show called Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In whose running skit called "News of the Future" announced in 1969 that the Soviet Union would collapse in twenty years, thereby not only calling the event, but the exact year, 1989.) Like his former boss, George Bush should have been impeached for his participation in Iran-Contra, but even with the passing of over a decade, the country was wary of being subjected to another period of self-flagellation and so allowed Bill Casey to take a (metaphoric?) cyanide capsule and Oliver North to don his Marine uniform and manhandle the U.S. congress during the Iran-Contra hearings to make the whole debacle disappear. So adamant were the American voters to see the emperor's clothing that they elected the rather peculiar Bush president. At the first opportunity, however, (and he offered it up on a silver platter by reneging on his "read my lips" promise not to raise taxes), they turned him out of office rather than tolerate him for a second term.

So anxious were the voters to put Bush behind them that they nominated and elected an Arkansas governor and striver named William Jefferson Clinton, popularly known, in the Southern fashion, as just plain Bill. So anxious were they to put Bush behind them that the voters turned a blind eye to leading indicators of his character such as the revelation of an affair with a woman named Jennifer Flowers and a laughable response to a query about his use of marijuana that had him smoking the weed, but not inhaling. (Later to gain entry to Bartlett's with the truly memorable, "It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.") A Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar who had evaded the draft during the war in Vietnam and thus the first president in a long time who had never been in uniform, Bill's idol was John F. Kennedy--for reasons that would only later become obvious. Just as fortune protects the working girl and presidents like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton was the recipient of another turn of fate that, (after a slightly rocky start in which he proposed that gays be allowed to openly serve in the military, his first lady's ill-starred run at inaugurating national health insurance and an inconveniently timed recession), saw one of the greatest "bubbles" in our financial history. Although the standard of living of most Americans was still in decline, the eight years of the Clinton presidency are viewed as a period of great prosperity. The man who would be labeled "the first Black president," and, at the same time seemed to have deftly co-opted enough of the Republican programme to survive the likes of Newt Gingrich and his "Contract with America," might have gone on to take action on what he described as the three leading issues in American life, namely, race, education and the restoration of American railways, a formidable trio. (He had apparently been scared off the health care issue.) Unfortunately, a White House intern ended the Clinton version of Camelot. The Monica Lewinsky scandal illustrated the fact that enough time had passed since Watergate for the previously unthinkable descent into another impeachment episode. (Strictly speaking, there was overwhelming evidence that presidents Reagan and Bush should have been impeached earlier and a wide consensus that Bush's son should also have been a candidate for that fate. Add Nixon and Clinton who actually were impeached, add Johnson's being forced out, and we have quite a run of presidents since 1963.) Then, too, Republicans relished the idea of showing that Democrats could also be impeached.

Republicans reserved for Clinton a kind of hatred that can only emerge between close relatives. They hated the man, hated him with a transcendency that overcame any overarching, grinding wheels of economics and history. In the end, young readers of the New York Times were treated to transcripts that spelled out in almost unspeakably lurid terms what the meaning of "is" was. Rather than spare the nation so humiliating and endless a preoccupation with his sexual infantilism and resign, Bill and his bride pointed to conservative conspiracies to "get" the two of them and braved it out. By the time his feckless Vice-President, Al Gore, ran for office, the country had had enough of Bill and anything and anyone associated with Bill.

Now, we can't entirely blame Clinton for Al Gore's not having won enough votes to preclude a right wing Supreme Court's coup d'etat that left him out of office in spite of his having won the election. The Democratic brain trust had done its best to insure that Bush, Jr. would ascend to the White House. Running Gore with a Jewish candidate for Vice-President almost guaranteed defeat in the Southern states. Gore did not carry his own state. Ironically, one tactic that seemed to have backfired was the candidate's distancing himself from Clinton. In all efforts that he was allowed, Clinton proved himself a formidable campaigner, always his strength, but Gore took the moral high ground in this as he would later in doing the gentlemanly thing and not insisting on a recount in Florida (as well as in other states where voting irregularities had been glaring).

For a wannabe cowboy from Texas whose dream job was to become baseball commissioner when he grew up, a drug and alcohol abusing rich kid from Yale who was a constant disappointment to his Connecticut Yankee father, who took a glamour job flying jets in the reserve during the war in Vietnam, George Bush, Jr. surprisingly turned out to be a credit to his Harvard Law school training in his debates with Al Gore. He more than held his own, particularly in one debate when the ever-awkward Gore seemed to want to intimidate him by invading his private space. And, after the slime through which the nation had been pulled, the zeitgeist seemed to favor a man who was now a born again Christian who when asked, "Who is your hero?", could, with a reasonably straight face, (although flushed with a poker player's look of triumph), utter, "Jesus Christ."

For most liberal and left wing observers, the conservative plan, particularly since the Reagan administration, seemed to be to dig America into so deep a hole that even if the worst were to occur, and we were to see a Democrat come to office with the agenda of instituting a counter-reformation, putting regulations back in place, repairing the country's health and social services, its infrastructure, its regressive tax codes that created the greatest gap between the rich and not just the poor but everyone else in the nation's history, it would be just plain impossible. Few even on the left could have predicted just how deep that hole could get until George, Jr. came to office. Nor would many have predicted that not just our Bill of Rights, but rights going back to the Magna Carta would be fed into his administration's paper shredders.

There had been preliminary episodes of what the historian Chalmers Johnson labeled "blowback" before the events of September 11, 2001. Blowback was a term used to define attacks on U.S. interests that were in effect responses to actions taken by our government that were only secret to the American people, and obviously not to the victims of those actions. Never before, however, had that blowback occurred on American territory. For the American people it was a surprise attack carried out in broad daylight, a crystal clear autumn day that brought devastation to New York and to Washington. With Americans now rallying around the "homeland," the Bush administration launched into two wars and created a garganutan security apparatus thatdid not blush from including torture and the demise of habeus corpus.

While trillions were being spent on or foreign wars, all borrowed money, unregulated financial institutions created trillions more in so-called derivatives, with some estimates putting the total figure at 500 trillion dollars, roughly every penny in wealth all Americans would create in the next thirty-five years. By the time this house of cards would collapse in the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Bush administration had already been deemed to have gone too far. With lack of respect for the constitution, two unpopular, unwinnable wars, the nation viewed abroad as a pariah state, wiser heads prevailed. The first sign of a change in direction came with the institution of the Iraq War Commission, staffed with the usual representatives of the nation's permanent government, (e.g.. Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton, shotgun riders and trouble-shooters on seemingly permanent standby) one of whom was selected to replace Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and still serves in that capacity under the Obama administration. Bush, and the neoconservative "cabal" around him, were effectively reined in. Few ducks have ever been lamer than Georgie in the closing months of his administration.

It is too early to reach a definitive characterization of our current president, Barack Obama, but a look back at the years since 1968 teaches us to be cautious about a Democrat's ascendancy to the White House translating into any fundamental change in policy. The fact is that the two Democratic presidents who have held office since 1968, prior to the Obama presidency, departed little from the policies of their Republican counterparts and, in fact, made significant contributions to moving the country farther to the right. It was Jimmy Carter who encouraged the "secret" war in Afghanistan that gave us Muslim fanatics armed with stinger missiles; it was he who chose to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics. No Republican was a more zealous cold warrior, and we live in the aftermath of decisions made by the pious preacher from Georgia. In spite of the fact that Carter attained a certain fame for a Playboy magazine interview in which he confessed that he'd "committed adultery in my heart many times" while his party cohort Bill Clinton showed fewer inhibitions, both men have in common their having followed in both their domestic and foreign policies a philosophy that makes them nearly indistinguishable from their brothers in the Republican Party. Clinton intervened militarily in both the former Yugoslavia and in Iraq; he ended "welfare as we knew it;" he deregulated the banking industry, and, (in a policy that conservatives have now disingenouously seized upon as having been the sole or major cause of the 2008 collapse), encouraged the proliferation of sub-prime mortgages without appropriate oversight. From1968 through 2008, a total of forty years, we have had twelve years of Democratic rule which saw no interruption in the overall thrust of American foreign policy.

This is not to argue that there are no differences at all in the ways that Democratic and Republican administrations behave. The Republican Party, once associated with fiscal conservatism, has more recently been bent on spending the nation into deeper and deeper debt in a pincer movement of promoting cuts in social programs while cutting taxes and spending with abandon on their own pet projects such as wars and trillions in defense so as to leave the larder empty, devoid of resources to devote to evil socialist ideas such as free public schools, affordable health care and public housing. The two wars we are fighting, even the flooding in New Orleans have created opportunities that seem to jump out of the pages of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. The war in Iraq saw the proliferation of an all-volunteer army supported by a host of private companies including extremely profitable corporate mercenary armies employed to supplement the shortfall created by the absence of a draft.

If there were those who thought that the conservative response to the near collapse of the financial system they were most responsible for creating was to be repentance or remorse, they were soon disappointed. Nope. Not our fault. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did it. Clinton and his henchman HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo were responsible. By urging banks to cease their long term policy of red-lining minority communities and, faced with Republican sabotage of affordable housing bills, making it possible for members of those communities to buy their own homes, they had nearly brought on a global depression. This argument is so patently disingenuous, so ignores the billionaires created by the derivative and hedge fund phenomenon, so conveniently manages to blame the victims that to linger on it for long tempts madness. Yet, linger on it we do via the affinity group of Southern conservatives and such offspring as the Tea Party thugs who take from the crisis the message that its cause was too much regulation and not enough private enterprise, problems they seek to remedy in the 2010 elections.

Of course, we now have a man in the White House who speaks truth to power. Will he change the course that our ship of state has been on since 1968? Well, he not only kept on Bush's Defense Secretary, he also kept on Bush's Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, though it should be said that both men were in effect drafted out of permanent government, sometimes known--at least metaphorically--as the Northeastern Establishment. Others followed. There was Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner and Paul Volcker as well. Does this mean that the sunbelt/bible belt conservative era brought in with Californian Richard Nixon is coming to an end? Judging by the fevered, frenzied and fanatical response of the American right through its Tea Party surrogates, one could certainly conclude that they believe that is possible. If that is the good news, it is slim good news indeed, for the crisis here in the U.S. and in the world at large seems at a dangerous crossroad.

The Unholy War Continues

2010-08-20T10:17:00.005-04:00

In my last post, I showed a true lack of political perspicacity by foolishly believing the issue of locating a Muslim cultural center in downtown Manhattan had been put behind us. What I left out of my equation was the extent to which politics in this country is driven by appealing to the basest emotions rather than reason. And there now exist in the public marketplace of ideas men and women of such low character that they will essentially play with fire to carry out their personal ambitions. The well is poisoned and just about everyone I speak to has drunk from it. To say a word in defense of Islam or to compare the crimes of Islamic nations to those of a Christian (and now a Jewish) nation is to enter a no man's land in this country, a place gone mad. This, in spite of the mayor of New York City and the president of the United States felicitously having displayed the integrity to utter words of support. (For which, needless to say, they will no doubt pay a political price.)

After it became clear that this was to be made an issue that would not so easily go away, demagoguery as usual began to veil itself behind the appearance of moderation. The cant of the demagogues states that, yes, they have a right to build their center, and, yes, we are proud of religious freedom and tolerance in this country, but sensitivity demands that the builders of the center find another location. Someone obviously got to our state's embattled governor who then found the time to take a stand on the issue and to actually offer state lands at another site. Rick Lazio, whose campaign for governor seems to have nicely survived a Village Voice article that exposed him as a shill of the hedge fund crowd, did not hesitate to take on the pose of a moderator in the "debate" that only continues to exist because of politicians like himself. Even the Catholic archbishop of the New York diocese came forward to offer his services as honest broker. There is no surprise in finding the usual agents of right wing Zionism, brazen veterans of the timeworn strategy of dehumanizing the enemy, going on the record against the center since no opportunity to demonize Islam, which just happens to be the belief system of the people whom they continue to oppress and to kill while occupying their lands.

People on the left are not immune. They acknowledge the demagoguery, but still have some discomfort, some marginal reservations when it comes to Islam. The use of terrorism is one issue. Years ago, when the film Battle of Algiers was first released, I was particularly impressed by one of the lines in the movie. Accused of terror tactics by a French officer, (in spite of the movie's making it clear that it was the French who first employed the tactic), an Algerian resister responds:

"Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets."

I never forgot the line nor did I forget the movie-which, in spite of the complex and disappointing reality that Algeria faced after independence, I recommended to many over the years. In fact, I had recommended the movie to a friend just a few months before the New York Times revealed on its front page that U.S. military commanders in Iraq were being shown the film for training purposes. Now I am in not in favor of killing people with either bombers or baskets, but for the West to disingenouously initiate a propaganda campaign that implies its moral superiority based on its use of bombers is one of the outrages of the modern era. "Yeah, but they kill innocent non-combatants!" Do these folks hear what they are saying? How many innocent non-combatants died in Iraq and Afghanistan? Taken together the estimates vary from 50,000 to over 1,000,000 casualties. Every time a terrorist bomb goes off in a crowded square the Western media deluges us in the blood of innocents, body parts and shoes strewn all over the place. Can you think of the media showing one, a single, solitary target in which what we call "collateral damage" is on lurid display? Moreover, even the issue of "suicide terrorism" as a sign of irrational zealotry had, I believed, been put to rest through the interesting scholarship of Robert Pape, who, in his study Dying to Win illustrates the manifest logic of the tactic for insurgent groups. No use of logic or reason, however, will convince the colonizers of the world to abandon this powerful, even if insidious, propaganda device in their campaigns against the colonized.

The second tenet of the Islamophobes is the Islamic treatment of women. Inevitably unmentioned in such diatribes are the varied and wonderful ways groups right here in the U.S. treat their women. Which lead us to perhaps the most powerful of all the propaganda devices we are now witness to, viz., the "tarring with the same brush" syndrome. If the generalizations we currently hear about an endemic virulence within the Muslim religion were universally applied to opponents within other nations and cultures that we have found ourselves at war at, we should probably have barbed wire fences around militaristic Prussians and Shinto Japanese.

Lost in all this is, as I earlier pointed out, is a long, proud and rich culture to which we ourselves owe a substantial debt. Lost, too, is the diversity of that culture. Hiden from view are the many wonderful men and women among Muslim non-combatants. Ultimately, we must come to understand that the loss is ours, not theirs.

The Insane Campaign Against Islam

2010-08-03T09:57:00.007-04:00

Today, the city fathers of New York will decide whether or not to allow the building of an Islamic cultural center in downtown New York, a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. Proponents of the site state their desire to have a center from which they can propagate greater understanding of Islam and Islamic history, and the proposal has the support of Mayor Bloomberg, a man of whom it can be fairly said that he never met a building project he didn't like. In spite of what appears to be an entirely wholesome mission, and in spite of the mayor's support, the proposal has generated a near apoplectic form of opposition from various quarters. The argument that has gotten the most attention in the media is that such a site would be an insult to the memory of all those who died in the Trade Center attack. This is only the most recent manifestation of a generalized attack on one of the world's major faiths that has taken place since the attacks of 911.

It has been commonplace in all the wars that America has fought to dehumanize our various foes. The depiction of the Japanese enemy as monkeys and apes during World War II, the use of the term "gooks" to describe our Korean foes during the Korean War and then later applied (ignorantly, mistakenly, for lack of a better epithet) to the Vietnamese during the war in Vietnam was allowed and encouraged. Even when fighting against our good, white Christian brothers such as the Germans, terms like Krauts and Heinies became part of our vocabulary. To this list we can now add Islamo-fascists, rag heads, terrorists and suicide bombers. The sad reality seems to be that it is just a lot easier to indulge in wholesale killing when one has made the enemy sub-human. A good deal of fine research has been done on the excesses of wartime propaganda in the past, but apparently we were never meant to take such findings as a warning against repeating our mistakes. Perhaps we should not be surprised, yet the frenzy of the attacks on Islam that have grown out of the attacks of 9/11 appear to have a new, more dangerous, and arguably even more irrational dimension than past lapses would have predicted. It is one thing to have soldiers in the field, with all the stresses of being under fire, resort to less than polite or intelligent terminology for the men and women trying to kill them; it is quite another to have, as we currently do, politicians, supposed intellectuals and media talking heads carrying on a campaign of disinformation and that any even moderately well educated individual should be ashamed to participate in.

Most of those who have benefited from a liberal education have long been taught that not only is Islam one of the world's great faiths but that, in the absence of Islamic cultural influence, the civilization we so like to boast of would not have evolved. Advances in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, art and architecture were being made in the Islamic world while the west was still in its dark ages. Islam, unlike Christianity, was and is a faith noted for its tolerance of other faiths. The argument that Islam is a particularly violent religion, prone to making converts at the point of a sword, now being made wholesale, flies not only in the face of Islamic history but of all history. Even if we put aside such historical events as the two world wars fought between good Christian nations in the last century that were responsible for nearly 100 million (mostly civilian) deaths, one might wonder if some of the professional Islamophobes had been too distracted during their early schooling to notice the depopulation of an entire hemisphere and the forced conversion of the remaining survivors under the cross and the sword. Any school child will have noted in fact the similarity between the great symbol of Christianity and the sword hilt as such as Columbus and those who followed him knelt on the beach fronts of North America, South America and the Caribbean, pious Jesuits at their side. It was not Islam that would later introduce the fire-bombing and atomic attacks on civilian populations.

Perhaps what we are suffering through is an inevitable by-product of a dysfunctional education system, for certainly no one with even the slightest knowledge of history could in all honesty ascribe to the readers of the Koran a particular penchant for violence. It is frightening to contemplate the possibility, however, that such know-nothingism is tolerated or even encouraged to serve the larger purposes of U.S. military strategy. Frightening because of its very real dangers and the enormous work it will take to undo such pernicious mythology when the time hopefully arrives when a peace can be brokered. The anti-Islam factions do seem to be a convenient adjunct of a policy that has the world's most powerful military machine using attacks by fringe elements as a rationale for invading and occupying whole nations, killing untold thousands of innocents in the process. What might have been dealt with via an intense, international criminal investigation was instead dealt with via the aerial bombardment of civilian centers and the not so covert encouragement of sectarian strife. Also frightening to contemplate is that the anti-Islam contingent is so potent because it serves the venal purposes of Israeli policy toward the populations of its occupied territories. That so much harm be done merely to serve Israel's short-term and short-sighted strategy is tantamount to a war crime.

It cannot be emphasized enough that this campaign against a faith with millions of adherents living in all the lands that stretch from North Africa through the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific (with pockets in most other geographic areas including the U.S.) is of a different order than the war time propaganda of the past. It is a campaign that has made its impact on the minds of millions around the world who either know no history or choose to ignore history in the name of a misplaced patriotism. "No, they're different. They are not like us. Look what they do to their women." are sentences uttered wholesale in our brave new millenium. Sadly, it is often even possible to hear such remarks made by one's own family members and friends. The disinformation campaign has been all too effective.

One last thought. Opponents of the Manhattan Islamic cultural center may wish to scan the list of those who died in the World Trade Center attack. There they will find the names of such as Shabbir Ahmad, Salman Hamdani, Mohammad Shah Jahan, Yasmeen Jamal, Mohammed Jawarta, Ahmed Ali, Umar Ahmad, Azam Ahsan... Muslims as well as Christians and Jews suffer for the intrigues of their governments.

Little Mike's Revenge Saga: The Destruction of the City

2010-07-15T22:04:00.022-04:00

Posted on light posts on First Avenue near 10th Street in the East Village by a Department of Traffic worker alerting citizens to the mayor's ambitious plan to redesign vehicular rules for his subjects. Thursday, July 15, 2010.

Study this design carefully. Where once First Avenue had six lanes available to auto traffic, these have been reduced to three. The mysteriously labelled "Floating" parking lanes will reduce the spaces available for parking between 10th and 11th Streets from approximately eight or nine spaces to just two or three. The pattern will be repeated the length of the avenue. If there is any sense in which the lane is floating, it does appear that there are now cars floating in the middle of the street. The opportunities for accidents as car doors swing open either into bike paths or lanes of moving traffic where once they could open safely onto a sidewalk will undoubtedly prove to be ample.

Adjoining the east side parking lane will be a lane restricted to buses. What the plan seems to ignore entirely is that taxis will be forced to take on and discharge passengers in one of the moving lanes and that there is no space alloted for truck deliveries. If this happens on both sides of the avenue simultaneously, the number of actual moving lanes will be reduced to just one.

Parked around the corner on 9th Street, I happened upon this vehicle:

When I inquired of the driver what the vehicle was there for, I was told that it was there to help phase in the new traffic pattern. When I asked if he thought the new traffic pattern made any sense, he just smiled wearily. Note that this huge van, drolly announcing that it is a "Emergency Response Mobile Command Center" (although I have never seen its like at any real emergency), has been placed on struts thereby strongly suggesting that it is actually the Emergency Response Immobile Command Center. Certainly, residents, shoppers and business owners on 9th Street will enjoy having it take up several parking spaces for the foreseeable future, just one more tactic in the overall plan to drive New Yorkers mad.

Meanwhile, back on First Avenue, a traffic officer was threatening to ticket the driver of a moving van because he had parked in the bike path. He and his client were a bit dismayed as to how they should proceed given the vagaries of the new plan. The driver of the grey sedan was similarly confused.

When, in the company of another irate citizen, I approached the traffic officer to inquire why she was not ticketing the armored truck at the corner which had been parked in the bike path for a long time, she decided it might be better to look for infractions around the corner. When asked if this new arrangement made any sense to her, she predictably noted that she was just doing her job. Her job, by the way, does not extend to issuing tickets to the many bikers illegally driving against traffic; her main mission is to focus on drivers of private automobiles. The bikers and other law-breakers need to be apprehended by the police, most of whom on this particular summer afternoon were apparently off either frisking Harlemites or undercover seeking out terrorists. Few were in evidence on First Avenue.

Take a close look at the so-called floating parking lane between 10th and 11th Streets. Note that there is barely space for two vehicles and those just happen to be yellow cabs:

Turning for a look downtown, between 9th and 10th Streets, which for some reason provides more floating spaces than the area between 10th and 11th, note that all but one of the five spaces created is occupied by yellow cabs.

And, for a more complete picture, take a look at who is parked in the bike path at the corner of 10th Street. Apparently the new rules will not apply to Department of Sanitation vehicles.

Now, all of this is so insane that it should be amusing, but it is difficult to keep one's sense of humor on the streets of our fair city nowadays. This mayor has virtually thrown up every impediment to the free flow of traffic imaginable short of complete prohibition. Earlier in the day, I needed to drop two passengers off at City Hall and thus had occasion to drive through a good part of lower Manhattan. True, a driver would be detached from reality entirely if he or she believed that the area around City Hall would ever be less than heavily congested. Yet, through the implementation of these so-called floating parking lanes, many streets and avenues are now reduced to one lane for (very, very slowly) moving traffic. This is further exacerbated by the designation on avenues of bus lanes which, in themselves at least, there is some rationale for. But it is not "in themselves." Travel downtown on Broadway, even in non-rush hours and there is barely an accessible lane. Factor in construction, and it is even more difficult to navigate down the one available lane. 34th Street, which serves as the major artery not just for cross-town traffic but as access to the Lincoln Tunnel, now has only one available lane. Similar configurations exist on other approaches to bridges and tunnels. Factor in, too, the absurd open "plazas" such as the one in Times Square where apparently clueless tourists sit on uncomfortable chairs their skin and lungs burning from the exhaust fumes inevitably created by the hundreds of cars forced to a mere idle by the resultant congestion. The mayor may not have gotten his congestion pricing, but he certainly achieved plenty of congestion. The so-called Street Fairs that he seems to have encouraged have made weekend commuting in the city a true nightmare since their clear intent is to hamper traffic and further dissuade the citizenry from driving in Manhattan. The fact that these supposed fairs have absolutely no connection to the communities they are planted in but offer up identical cheap and counterfeit Asian goods and the same greasy food wherever and whenever they occur has not only made our city a dark labyrinth but has cheapened the experience of being a walker in the city.

Our beloved broad ways, our expansive thoroughfares, have been rendered something akin to the chutes in which cattle are led to slaughter in abbatoirs. Try now, as one could in the past, to take visitors on a drive through Manhattan to see the sights. It is not a happy experience. What is more, so much harm has been done, so much more chaos is still being created, that even if a more enlightened civic leader should take office and attempt to undo this madness, the mayor has dug us into so deep a hole that it will take a long time to remedy.

Supposedly, the mayor would have us use public transportation. This, too, is at best disingenouous. We are now in the throes of major cutbacks by the MTA--lines are being taken out of service, station attendants are being phased out; there was even a truly heartless suggestion that the city's school kids be forced to surrender their MTA passes. The sheer crassness of all this should cause public outrage, and although there is some, one has to wonder what it would take to get New Yorkers to really express their outrage and storm City Hall. It is not just traffic that seems paralyzed; it is the voices of the people, people so beaten down by their resignation in the face of a rich, connected, arrogant and imperious little man that they have been rendered impotent in the face of his assault upon us all.

Mike and Janet: Masterminds of Our Brave New World

When Little Mike, a man who had accumulated untold billions and modestly named his empire after himself, wants something, Little Mike gets it--or there is hell to pay. One of the notions held by innocent New Yorkers is that it is good to have a rich man in an office like Mayor, because a rich man can't be bought and is therefore incorrutptible. The larger reality of having rich men serve seems to get lost. That it is they who do the buying, who are themselves the corrupters seems beyond comprehension. The first thing they buy is the office itself, having the ability to outspend any and all opposition. When Little Mike wanted to keep the job of mayor in spite of the fact they he was about to finish his second term and the voters had twice voted in favor of term limits, he simply ignored the wishes of the commoners and bought off enough votes on a joke known here in New York as the City Council, an institution whose only rival for complete and utter superfluousness in improving the lives of the average citizen is the benighted State Legislature, and he went right ahead and ran for a third term. By election day, there were almost enough angry New Yorkers to thwart Little Mike's design, but the Democratic Party bosses (no doubt largely by design) ran a candidate so singularly unqualified and uninspiring that Little Mike eked by, essentially because most voters stayed home.

Little Mike's specialty as Mayor is overdevelopment. He is, by nature, a landlord and he hangs with other landlords. While his buddies had tons of money derived from derivatives during the recent "bubble," billions were invested in real estate. Cranes were everywhere (including, in one instance, a hapless citizen's living room). Once having induced the rich to purchase multi-million dollar apartments and posh office spaces, however, Little Mike felt that it behooved him to give them the kind of setting they deserved. Unfortunately, an uninterrupted illusion of living in a luxury enclave suffers for the presence of all the riff-raff from the outer boroughs many of whom--aghast at the prospect of using a crowded, dirty, unhealthy and often dangerous subway system--take their cars into the city. Little Mike thought he had come up with a brilliant tactic to purge his zona rosa of unclean outer borough types--congestion pricing.

The idea was simple. Impose on every vehicle coming into Manhattan an $8.00 charge, an idea that hearkens back to medieval European toll gates on roads leading into the big cities. Of course, one of Mike's ploys is to couch each one of his schemes in Green Rhetoric. No, he is not an elitist building walls around his silk-stocking enclave; he is motivated purely by a desire to have cleaner air and more open spaces. This sophistry, this disingenous bobbing and weaving, was so transparent with regard to the Mayor's real motives that--horror of horrors--he failed to get his way.

Little Mike is truly a little man, however, and, like the spoiled child who, losing at Monopoly, throws over the board and sends the little plastic houses flying across the room, he would seek revenge. If he couldn't win the game legitmately, he would find another way.

...you can not only play; you can do whatever you darn please!

2010-06-30T08:29:00.002-04:00

I would argue here that regardless of what one thinks of the merits or horrors of the two great revolutions that took place in the twentieth century, the mere fact of their existence forced capitalism to reforms that might otherwise never have taken place.

I would further argue that, because of the demise of the Soviet Union and communist China, we have entered a historical era in which capitalist states see a unique opportunity to tear up social contracts earlier agreed to, contracts that were only drafted in the first place largely to defend themselves against the existential threat that the USSR and China represented.

--excerpted from my writing in the previous blog.

That ideological dispute settled the argument over whether capitalism was the best economic system.

--from a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times referring to the Cold War.

Perhaps this is what Putin had in mind when he stated that the destruction of the Soviet Union was “a geopolitical tragedy.” Just as the scale of World War II allowed Western historians to evade dealing with the deeper implications of the only slightly less horrific first world war, a war that could not be blamed on Stalin, those same historians now have a hard time explaining why capitalism—newly unfettered by the threat of a communist monolith—now seems on the brink of collapsing.

This is not to say that we lacked our own, homegrown revolutionaries. Even before the Great Depression, working conditions were such that the U.S. produced its own Socialists, Communists, Wobblies and other left wing factions. May 1, or May Day, celebrated by workers around the world, in fact commemorates the Haymarket Square Riot that took place at a workers’ demonstration in Chicago on what was actually the fourth of May, 1886. By 1919, however, the success of the Russian Revolution elicited the Palmer Raids as a response here in the U.S., a government-sponsored reign of terror cited in history books as the period of the first Red Scare. When the U.S fell into the depths of the Great Depression, however, even scare tactics could not entirely suppress a renaissance of left wing organizing. It would only be due to the gearing up of the enormous war machine required to fight WWII that the labor of U.S. workers was once again in demand. Even so, the standard of living for most Americans would not rise until well after the war had ended, with the inception of the golden Eisenhower age, the template decade (1953-1963) for American prosperity (and, in retrospect, a singular event).

Guided by the patrician Franklin D. Roosevelt, (who was widely condemned by his fellow patricians as a traitor to his class), American capitalism was saved. On some very rare occasions, Socialists and Communists gained elective office, but for the most part, a real revolutionary movement never gained any momentum. In order to save the system, however, concessions had to be made. It was during this period that the U.S. labor movement grew in influence, often spurred on by Communist organizers in the big industrial cities of the North. Banking and Wall Street interests were compelled to give way to a spate of regulation designed to protect the ordinary citizen. In 1935, frightened by the prospect of an army of unemployed whose living conditions were often desperate, legislators created the Social Security act, (actually titled Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI)).

To this day, conservatives like to portray the Roosevelt era as responsible for creating Big Government with all of its evils. In fact, conditions had become ripe for reform much earlier, during what is called the Progressive Era, the era of the first President Roosevelt. When Ronald Reagan uttered the famous “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he was repudiating not just the reforms instituted by the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt, but also those initiated by the Republican hero, Teddy Roosevelt. Both Roosevelts understood that if capitalism was to be saved, reforms needed to be put in place.
Just as the Progressive movement anticipated the more far-reaching reforms that would take place in a world made far more dangerous for capitalism by the success of the Russian Revolution, the move by Reagan conservatives to deconstruct those same reforms anticipated the demise of the Soviet threat and only began to come to flourish after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992. So-called neo-conservatives essentially began a putsch against all government entities whose role it was to check the excesses of private enterprise. The other prong of the neo-conservative attack on government was an intense campaign to privatization across the board, even extending, most egregiously, to the privatization of the armed forces. The campaign continued unabated during the at least nominally Democratic administration of Bill Clinton.

Armed with the pseudo-intellectual credentials of such as pop-Nietzchean novelist Ayn Rand and the laissez-faire crowd nurtured in the nineteenth-century hothouse atmosphere of the University of Chicago, the so-called Chicago school, Republican legislators turned an intense beacon on every manifestation of perceived government interference in the free flow of cash. A strong impression arose that, for this political camp—from Milton Friedman to Newt Gingrich on down—the motto was carpe diem. The fall of the Soviet Union and the earlier “gains” made by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher during the crisis of the seventies and eighties mobilized the forces on the right. The sense was that the right had to take advantage of this unique historical opportunity not only to bury contemporary socialist tendencies, but to dig a series of holes so deep that—even were there to be a rebirth of such thinking—it would take a future generation forever to claw its way out, or, even better, make it impossible.

When the cat is not just away, but gone forever...

2010-06-14T12:36:00.011-04:00

For all the folks who give little weight to historical “what ifs,” the thought experiment of envisioning how twentieth century history might have gone differently is a pointless one. Recent events, however, have me reprising a scenario in which the Russian Revolution of 1917 failed or never took place and being rewarded with some provocative conclusions about how world (“globalized”) capitalism has evolved now that the U.S.S.R. has in fact collapsed. Before I present this view, however, let me dispense with, out of hand, what I would imagine to be a conservative view of how things might have gone. For this, we need not go very far; the example of Communist China, with its far shorter life span, will do nicely.

What the Chinese call the “liberation” that took place under Mao Zedong in 1950 lasted a little more than two decades before a communist regime(n) was replaced by the almost maniacal capitalism the nation is now in the throes of, far shorter than the Soviet Union’s run of more than seven decades, the biggest part of the twentieth century. Conservatives, I would imagine, will argue that had the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek continued to rule, the disruptions of the fifties, sixties would never have taken place, and China would have quickly evolved into the capitalist powerhouse it now is. For why this view is sheer nonsense, the term “liberation” is worth analyzing a bit. Up until 1950, China was a conglomerate of what the Western powers like to euphemistically call “spheres of influence.” Had there not been a revolution, that reality would no doubt have continued. Whatever one may think of China’s various manifestations since 1950, one incontrovertible reality is that it is the Chinese and the Chinese alone who came to control their nation’s fate. One need only recall the lengthy debate here in the U.S., following the expulsion of Chiang to Taiwan about “who lost China?” as if it was ours to lose. The perceived loss of China played no small role in throwing our country into the madness of McCarthyism for a good part of the 1950s.

Nevertheless, conservatives likely fantasize that a thriving Nationalist China would soon have emerged from the ruins of World War II and centuries of domination by the U.S., England and others of the European powers. I should say here that this is a point upon which one can only speculate. I have never seen such a conservative argument made directly in print, nor can we know if such an argument, if and when made, could be delivered with a straight face.
I would argue here that regardless of what thinks of the merits or horrors of the two great revolutions that took place in the twentieth century, the mere fact of their existence forced capitalism to reforms that might otherwise never have taken place. After the European and American military expeditions to Russia failed to thwart its revolution, and the Red Army under Trotsky finally dispatched the White Army in the early 1920s, capitalist ruling classes in all of the advanced nations could never go to bed without fearing that they would be awakened by the sound of their own working classes rising. That fear is now gone. There may be some lingering mice roaring in the Caribbean, South America or Asia, but, for the foreseeable future at least, it seems the great Marxist Utopian vision has been relegated to the “ash heap of history.” (Ronald Reagan’s [or one of his better educated speechwriter’s] play on Leon Trotsky’s having earlier damned capitalists to the “dustbin of history.”)

Before extending my argument any further, let me anticipate here another myth of conservative historiography that would have things just rosy on our planet had the Russian revolution never occurred. There is the small matter of World War II and the estimated 60-70 million lives that it cost. Conservative history is like a set of Russian nesting matrushka dolls with lots of embedded mythology. This construct renders it a lot more difficult to take on any one event or historical manifestation without dealing with the almost interminable nested “axioms” of the faith. “How,” one of their axiomatic arguments goes, (if their response is to be consistent with others of their arguments), “can you even entertain the notion that the world is a better place as a result of the Russian revolution, when it gave us the two most evil men in history, Hitler and Stalin, who, in turn, gave us WWII?”

Although given the dimensions of the human tragedies that the twentieth century witnessed, one must guard against glibness, I will nevertheless confess to wondering how the mere 37 million casualties of World War I, (“the Great War, the “war to end all wars”) could be explained away had not a second world war rendered it a prelude to even greater disaster. How explain the blood bath fought between good White Christian capitalist nations without any Evil Empire to blame? Had we been spared the greater horrors that were to come just twenty-five years later into the 20th century, would the earlier war so easily been written off as an aberration or suppressed in collective memory?

Faced with a communist threat, one of the ways world capitalism found it easier to sleep at night was to allow and encourage Fascism to flourish. With thugs like Franco, Mussolini and Hitler “cleansing” their societies in Europe and supposedly modernized post-Meiji Shinto Japan in Asia using a Son god to the same end, a real “axis” of evil protected the gates against other Russian-style uprisings in the still-born nation states of the world that had never quite gotten the trick of evolving into liberal democracies. For, in spite of Marx and Engels’ belief that revolutions would first be successful in advanced England or Germany, events would prove that theirs was an ideology most effectively shaped into a weapon in largely peasant societies with still living memories of virtual enslavement. None of this precluded Western sages from asserting, by a not quite elegant twist of logic, (and it is a permanent fixture in Western historical writing), that it is Communism’s fault that Fascism came into existence. Rather than take on that disingenuous argument here, it may be more productive to focus some historical hindsight on events here in the U.S. during the period between the two world wars.

Here, in the new world, a young democracy that no foreign army had placed foot in since the War of 1812, protected from foreign enemies by two vast oceans, where its own imperial expansion had involved the facile genocide of stone age aboriginals and a new navy’s adventurism in the far offshore Pacific and sleepy Caribbean, fascism did not find so fertile a soil as in class-bound, blood-drenched and war-weary Europe. Thus, while Germany, Italy and Japan kept their working classes under control by forcing them into uniform and fully employing them in the creation of death machines on a scale the world had never seen, the U.S. had the luxury, at least for a while, of keeping a small army and pacifying its workers with a New Deal. Unlike Europe, U.S. rulers, though confronted by millions of unemployed, an increasingly angry working class, did not need to fret about a vast empire on our borders threatening from without and potentially causing havoc within. In short, the U.S. could attempt reform.

(To be continued.)

Voiture de luxe: China as a Repainted Audi

2010-06-08T10:15:00.014-04:00

When Voiture de luxe opens we find a middle-aged teacher, Li Qiming, disembarking from a ferry, having left his countryside home in search of his son in the city of Wuhan. Both Qiming's son and daughter have left home to start new lives in the city, joining the wave of young people following a similar course in the new China. What drives Qiming to search for his son is the fact that he has not heard from him in a long time, and his wife, dying of cancer, wishes to see her son again before she dies. Qiming is met by his daughter, Yanhong, who takes him to her apartment in the city. Yanhong shares her flat with another young woman, A Li. Upon entering the flat, we can see in Qiming's face an immediate recognition of the circumstances that both of the young women live in. Qiming is stoic, yet the worn, slender, once handsome intellectual clearly takes in all the significance of what he sees in the flat. On the other hand, as a loving father, denial seems also to be at work, and he does not immediately come to any conclusion about how his daughter is earning her living.

Yanhong is a beautiful young woman, and we soon see how she earns her living when she goes off to her job. Her workplace, ostensibly a karaoke club, is in fact a well-appointed brothel. Any visitor to China over the last decade will be familiar with the club's decor. As clients leave their luxury automobiles to enter the club, they are greeted by rows of attractive young women who bow, smile and utter a demure ni hao. Inside, marble floors are polished to a dizzingly high shine, curved staircases and state-of-the art lighting abound. Trade the dominant red of the karaoke club for more subtle hues and the setting is one which has become ubiquitous in China's burgeoning multi-star hotels. The contrast between Yanhong's workplace, her living quarters and the meaner streets of much of the city behind its Potemkin village facade of luxury is jarring.

The preferred companion of a brutish customer who is clearly a gang leader, Yanhong is nevertheless called from his side by the club's reckless owner, Da Ge, with whom she is in a relationship of sorts. This is clearly a mistake on Da Ge's part, a mistake which drives the plot of the film. Da Ge's relationship to Yanhong is somewhat nebulous. An older man who is not Yanhong's physical match, he is part lover, part boss, part pimp, and, as we later discover, soon to be the father of her child. While this subplot simmers in the background, we watch Qiming begin the search for his son. In the course of doing so, he encounters a police officer, a man of his own generation with whom he has an immediate affinity. Like Qiming, the police officer is about to retire, but out of sympathy, exerts a special effort to find the boy. After the detective obtains a lead to the boy's wherabouts, Qiming decides to celebrate by inviting him, as well as his daughter and her boyfriend, to dinner at a restaurant.

By the time the dinner takes place, we have learned through a flashback that Qiming's son had been in a gang with Da Ge, and it was their ill-conceived plan to hijack a luxury car that brings all of these characters together. By drawing the odd, losing playing card, it is Qiming's son who must stand in the middle of a dark road and get the driver of a luxury car to stop. The plan is only half successful since Da Ge gets his car, but, in the process, Qiming's son is killed. It is only when Yanhong is hospitalized after an assault engineered by the mobster who resented her being taken off to Da Ge in the club, that Da Ge, remorseful and guilt-ridden over the assault on his pregnant girlfriend, confesses that it is he who is responsible for the death of her brother.

The dinner party at which the protagonists meet might well be a scene directed by Hitchcock. It is clear early on that the detective recognizes Da Ge, and for the persistent police officer, who accepts a ride home from Da Ge and then asks to see the automobile's registration, the ride is his last. Shortly after, with the detective's dead body at his side, Da Ge is intercepted by his mobster nemesis and is himself assassinated. The film ends with Yanhong leaving the city to return to her rural village. She there tells her father of her brother's real fate, and in the closing sequence, we see Yanhong delivering hers and Da Ge's child as Qiming sits outside of the delivery room resignedly listening to his daughter's labor pains.

Ordinarily, the cinematic cliche of trading the death of one character for the birth of another is used to represent hope. And although the expression on Qiming's face as he awaits the birth of his grandchild may be somewhat ambiguous, there is nothing ambiguous about what that birth represents in the overall context of this tale. Director Wang Chou's view of where China's present course is taking the nation is deeply pessimistic. In the newborn child, the blood of victim and victimizer is inextricably mingled. Yanhong may be back in her village, but she brings with her the seed of corruption she may have hoped to leave behind. When first she returns home, she goes to see her father in the school where he teaches. The landscape is a clear departure from that of booming Wuhan. What we see is a wide shot of the school, a wide sand-colored brick building bearing a red flag, an expanse of sand-colored playground in the foreground. Though true to what schools look like all over Asia, it is here an image of innocence that poignantly hearkens to traditional hopes for the future. Yanhong goes to a child's swing that she recalls from her childhood, and it is while seated on the swing that she tells her father what happened to her brother.

Yanhong's double migration, her return to the countryside, of course suggests that one can't go home again. In an early conversation between Qiming and the detective, we learn that the drama of the urban-rural divide had already played out in the life of her father. When a lead on the boy's whereabouts leads the two men to a kitchen on the campus of Wuhan Universty, Qiming announces that he had been a student there forty years before, during the Cultural Revolution, and that, because he had "said something wrong," he was "sent down," that is, sent to the countryside to do penance for his crime. With the Cultural Revolution long over, Qiming might well have returned to the city, but he makes a choice to stay and teach in the rural village. "I miss my students," he confesses shortly after arriving in Wuhan. He, too, cannot go home again. This writer has had more than one experience in China with Chinese old enough to have experienced the Cultural Revolution to know that, for many who lived through the period--Western characterizations aside--it was a period of hope and even expanded horizons. For many who were sent down, life long attachments were made, and those who participated came to look back at their lives among rural peoples not merely with nostalgia, their heads filled with propaganda songs, but with great emotion.

What is incontestable in this film is what has happened to Qiming's children as a result of jumping in Wuhan's turbulent waters--one has died, the other become a prostitute. Even Da Ge, who at times actually seems sympathetic, is a victim, perhaps of his greed or even his lapses into humanity, but also as a consequence of his ineptitude for a life of crime. He is simply not ruthless enough to compete. There is a scene (which at first may seem gratuitous) in which we see the stolen Audi, the luxury car that has cost the life of Qiming's son, being repainted. Great care is taken to cover glass and chrome with newspaper and masking tape and we watch the car, originally a silver gray, morph to a glossy black vehicle and watch it imperiously cruise out of the garage where the work was done. The car is a symbol of the new China, a mere reworking of capitalist fantasies of lives drenched in luxury. When Yanhong's dad and his detective/friend travel about, they travel on bicycles, not in luxury cars. Da Ge's stolen Audi had its parallel in the collapsed Soviet Union, where in the early nineties, rows of black Mercedes limousines driven by what were presumed to be members of the Georgian mafia could be seen parked outside of Moscow's and St. Petersburg's new luxury hotels.

For its view of the environmental and social costs of China's new path, Luxury Car is an invaluable work of art.

Wang Chao's "Luxury Car": A Rare Look at the Reality of Post-Mao China

2010-05-31T21:40:00.014-04:00

Chinese director Wang Chou's Luxury Car, (Voiture de luxe), is a deeply moving and a shocking film, deeply moving for the craft with which Chou tells his story, shocking because the film ends up not merely being an allegory of a failed revolution, (which really wouldn't be much of a surprise), but because it is so deeply critical of what China has become that it strongly suggests that China's failure to hold onto its communist ideology represents a profound loss for its people. Viewers of Eastern European cinema have become accustomed to what has been labelled "soviet nostalgia." Chou's indictment goes further than most of the work in that genre. This is a film noir whose darkness grows out of the garish, almost obscent neon glitter that Chou allows to stand for the new China.

The shock a Western viewer experiences after viewing such a work seems, on reflection, somewhat ingenuous. Among China's enormous population, it should probably come as no surprise that there are more than a few citizens who would agree with Chou's vision. One can only speculate on how many Chinese are sympathetic to Chou's point of view. Nevertheless, we here in the West do not often gain exposure to such work and it does make one wonder about the present Chinese government's letting this film be shown at all, either domestically or abroad. (The film was given a Prix un certain regard at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.) The admittedly small American audience who might wish to see this film have CUNY TV's City Cinematheque to thank for the opportunity.

City Cinematheque, presided over by City College Professor Jerry Carlson, is a jewel in the programming crown of the City University of New York's public television outlet, known here in New York as CUNY TV 75. The show and its host deserve enormous praise for delivering to its following (which one can only hope is growing) films that are outstanding either because they are of great importance in the history of film, or because they give us rare insight into the cinemas of other nations. As Professor Carlson would no doubt himself admit, the show serves the valuable function the many art theaters that once graced the city used to fulfill. Most of those little art theaters, along with their free espresso and cookies, are long gone and with them the opportunity for both young and old, but particularly the young to catch up on the great works of the past and to see what is considered cutting edge here in the U.S. and around the world.

Since CUNY TV's focus is understandably on education, an additional feature of City Cinematheque is a thirty-minute discussion between Professor Carlson and, usually, some appropriate member of CUNY's staff following each film. Guest discussants are often colleagues in the school's Film Department, but they may be men and women from other disciplines and venues as well, including, on occasion, the film makers themselves. Given the debt we owe Professor Carlson for his efforts, given the obvious scholarship that he possesses, given his equally obvious love of the art form, it seems less than gracious to carp with him over the content of those discussions. Yet, I probably share with at least a few others among his viewers, the occasional experience of listening to what Professor Carlson has chosen to discuss about a particular film and wanting to jump into the television set, grab him by his tweedy lapels and scream. The discussion period following the showing of Wang Chou's Luxury Car was such a time.

Now, before I launch into what I consider to be my justifiable criticisms of the discussion following the film, let me pause a moment to reprise my gratitude to the show's host. Where else on television could one currently get access to some of the great silent classics as well as avant-garde work coming out of South America, Eastern Europe or even North Africa? Where else on television can one gain the invaluable insights into the current state of film-making around the world that are obviously the fruit of Professor Carlson's deep and vast knowledge of film, film makers, film history and breaking news from within the industry? To cite just one small example from the very discussion that caused me so much consternation: not only did we learn that China now has over 100 cities with populations in excess of one million, we also learned that the Chinese are currently building vast film houses with large screens and sterophonic sound in those cities in an effort to satisfy the Chinese appetite for what Americans used to call "going to the movies." A bit of film history and a bit of social history as well. In a sense, Professor Carlson may be seen as having earned immunity from the quibbles of his less than forgiving viewers for his occasional lapses. What compels me to risk being called an ingrate or a crank in the case of Luxury Car is what I see as the film's urgent message, a message that would have profited from the kind of explication that Professors Carlson and his guest responder for the film, Cindy Wong, (also of CUNY), seemed almost studiously to avoid.

Since my discussion of Luxury Car will be political in nature, I feel one other aspect of Professor Carlson's television persona needs to be mentioned, namely his political bent. Actually, here again, I think our host's performance has been laudable. Carlson seems to call them as he sees them: cinematic fascist gangsters, communist apparatchiks, Southern racists all meet with the same opprobrium. He is eminently fair, and thus, appearing to have do ideological axes to grind, he no doubt often makes ideologues both of the left and the right unhappy. There are occasions, perhaps, when our host has determined that it might be best to allow a film to speak for itself. As I suggest above, just making certain films available may be considered service enough. Viewers can draw their own conclusions. Interpretations will inevitably differ. Yet, I will confess, on this night, Professor Carlson had me screaming at my television set, "When are you going to talk about the film? Talk about the film, for crying out loud!"

I would argue that Luxury Car, (the title Voiture de luxe is due to French collaboration in its production), is no less than an allegory for contemporary China, an allegory which has as its narrative the descent from the relative virtue of the communist years into a nightmare of whorehouse capitalism. Little wonder then that the film has been essentially ignored in China as well as abroad. For many years we were accustomed to Chinese films being censored for being anti-communist. Now, in the post-Mao era, for reasons that should be obvious to all, it appears that it is a pro-communist work that can get a Chinese artist in trouble. Some may be tempted to conclude that China surely has its own version of European-style "soviet nostalgia," that this is what is on view in Luxury Car. I would argue, to the contrary, that this is a film that not only presents a view of contemporary, capitalist China in the darkest moral terms, but that boldly asserts that the communist period, including the period of the cultural revolution, (an historical episode inevitably depicted here in the West an intrinsically evil), was morally superior to the horrors that are now unfolding in China.

Mao’s body was still warm when the latent forces of capitalism rather brutally took the helm and started to redirect the course of the Chinese ship of state. The group labeled “the Gang of Four” included Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. She was eventually condemned to life imprisonment and committed suicide in 1991. The "Gang," (which also included Lin Biao, erstwhile hero of the revolution), fought a short-lived and vain struggle against the new tide and was brought down in a coup d’etat in 1976, just a month after Mao’s death. The group was unsurprisingly indicted as counter-revolutionary by a regime soon led by the born-again entrepreneur Deng Xiaoping (appropriately, a near homonym for "shopping"). Deng led the transition to capitalism. Now, some thirty-five years later, Mao’s portrait may still hang at the entrance to the Forbidden City, but China is no longer Maoist or even, I would argue, communist in any real sense of the term. That the regime currently in power has Mao spinning in his Tiananmen sepulcher seems little in doubt. On the other hand, few would dispute the extent to which millions of Chinese were champing at the bit, waiting for the demise of the great leader so that they could give expression to their ancient passion for building family treasure. They were always there, biding their time. Although often used to describe the people of Great Britain, the phrase “a nation of shopkeepers” * seems more accurately to describe the Chinese character.

The vaunted economic miracle may have factories turning out enormous quantities of goods--from flimsy cotton t-shirts to high-tech appliances--and exporting their wares all over the world, but every political regime, every political philosophy has its icons, and, in China, whether the government admits to it or not, the icon of its new world order is a young girl from the countryside working in a factory for pennies an hour. In exchange for the opportunity to get rich, the Chinese must now pay for everything. The state factories are mostly all gone and, with them, the guarantee of employment. The Chinese worker must now "jump in the ocean" of private enterprise if she hopes to survive at all. While the factory girl may symbolize the new economic order, for the artist, the perennial and universal view of how such young women are used has her sellling not her manual labor, but her body. Like crocuses erupting out of the ashes of a volcanic eruption, the first flowers of capitalism in failed socialist states are the young prostitutes. In Shanghai, where once the Peace Hotel housed guests of the Communist Party, it now houses young girls whose charms are advertised by their pimps on the hotel's front steps. And so it is with Li Yanhong, the heroine of Luxury Car.

Having now spent too much time providing background, I will invite the reader to look at the follow-up blog to this one in which I will attempt an analysis of the film.

* A phrase ascribed to Napoleon, but, originally found in Adam Smith, appropriately enough: "To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers." After the 2008 crisis, China is seen as more than ever compelled to raise up “a people of customers” and abandon its large dependence upon exports. Smith’s insight also provides a clue to the present nature of governance in China.

The End of Public Education?

2010-04-10T14:38:00.001-04:00

The death bed regret of Milton Friedman was that he could not list among his many accomplishments the total destruction of teachers’ unions in this country. Little did we expect to discover that one of the candle-bearing acolytes at his theoretical bedside was no less than Barack Obama, a future Democratic president brought into office with considerable assistance from those very unions. Yet, what we are currently witnessing in the calls for charter schools and the attacks on teachers, first, as stubborn adherents of unionism, and, second, as a bunch of incompetents is fast becoming a hallmark of the Obama administration. We have now reached a crossroads where it is difficult to determine whether public schools are under attack in order to destroy teachers’ unions or teachers’ unions are under attack in order to destroy public education. A fine distinction, no doubt, for the privatization movement which has amazingly—and irrationally—survived its having given birth to the greatest economic crisis since 1929.
Friedman did not see in American public schools a hallowed democratic institution that guaranteed free schooling for our children; rather he saw in the public schools a last remnant of socialism. This may seem bizarre, given that the idea that children should be educated at the expense of their communities goes back not to some New Deal innovation or Marxist agenda but is a centuries’ old icon—from the urban school teeming with immigrants to the one-room little red school house ringing its bell on the open prairie. For Friedman, however, any institution or enterprise which bore the adjective “public” was a lingering cancer in the body politic. Even more frustrating for the Chicago guru, however, was that the teachers’ unions (and their defined benefits pensions) maintained their viability in spite of thirty years of union busting inaugurated with Ronald Reagan’s crass destruction of the air traffic controllers’ union.
When one reflects upon the complex history that propelled this country into a thirty-year period of frenzied privatization and deregulation, leading it to tear up much of the progressive legislation it had taken a good part of the twentieth century to achieve—issues of race, of social malaise, of stubborn sectionalism, of declining empire—one cannot leave out the fact that even prior to the Reagan counter-revolution, it has been as American as apple pie for policy makers of both parties to wage a thinly veiled campaign against the notion that anything good can come from government sponsored or subsidized institutions.
Public schools, health facilities, libraries, transportation have been intentionally under-funded lest the average American fall prey to the notion that publicly provided services can be as good, or, heaven forbid, even better than profit-driven services. “You get what you pay for.” Unless you put out cold cash, you can’t expect very much. (Of course, it might occur to the more sophisticated citizen that he does pay for public services through taxation, and thus the unrelenting campaign by the right wing to lower or eliminate the tax “burden”—unless those tax dollars are earmarked for “defense,” which, through some magical transubstantiation, government manages to give us the largest cornucopia of state-of-the-art, shiny, futuristic weapons of death the world has ever seen.) It is a not so subtle education process, and the lessons become more severe as one goes down the class ladder and crosses what, in our still highly segregated nation, are the clear lines of demarcation separating white from black and brown citizens. White, suburban schools are clearly better funded than inner-city schools. Mass transit, which suffers generally from under-funding, the premium being on automobile and gasoline sales, particularly suffers when its mission is to transport the poor and working classes to their low-paying jobs.
There is considerable irony in the threats teachers’ unions are now confronted with from practically every quarter. They, after all, have paid their dues. Before looking back to how we came to this pass, however, it might be worth while to point out that, fat as they are portrayed, a remnant aristocracy of labor, they have already made considerable concessions. The United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 of the American Federation of Labor, long the largest local in the A.F.L-C.I.O., and long led by the infamous Albert Shanker, is command central for teacher unionism. It long ago began to come to terms with pressure to soften its demands. Following the tumultuous 1968 school strike over community control, the New York State legislature enacted (classically, by one vote, cast by a teacher) the Taylor Law which outlawed strikes by teachers and other municipal employees, with a stroke of the pen depriving the unions of their most powerful weapon. By now, there are five “tiers” in the union’s pension plans. With each succeeding tier, the terms under which a teacher can retire have become less generous. A new teacher will have to work longer for fewer benefits than a teacher who began her career in the 1960s. Almost all of the “Tier One” teachers are gone from the system. And, although in the relatively affluent 1990s a mayor who was committed to improving the city’s schools finally brought teacher salaries more in keeping with the salaries being earned in the white suburbs, those wage scales only came after a period of decades through which most teachers were forced to work two and sometimes three jobs in order to maintain their families. It would be difficult to caricature teachers as leaning on their shovels when they were so underpaid that (the once taboo) “moonlighting” was draining energies from such tasks as lesson planning, grading papers and the high-energy requirements of creativity in the classroom. Nevertheless, the prospect of paying a senior teacher with longevity and the equivalent of a Ph.D. a wage of around $100,000 a year and the promise of a defined benefit pension (and a potential annuity) elicits the full range of dark emotions, particularly during a time characterized as the Great Recession. For the spiritual descendants of Milton Friedman, certainly, it is irksome, to put it mildly, that an essentially moribund union movement can still throw up a barrier to its complete eradication from the American labor landscape in the form of the stubbornly viable teachers’ unions.
For those who carefully followed the career of Al Shanker, all of this is heavily weighted with irony. Over the course of his career as leader of the UFT, Shanker’s main mission was to keep in check the left wing within his rank-and-file. The UFT was itself born in response to the threat posed by the left-leaning old Teachers Union (TU). The newborn UFT had hardly had enough time to organize before the onset of the Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam saw thousands of radicalized young teachers enter its ranks. When with a deep collective roar, the amassed delegates to the union’s Delegate Assembly voted to condemn the war in Vietnam over Shanker’s opposition, he acted quickly to reduce the number of delegates each school could send to the Assembly and lengthened the term of shop stewards, called “Chapter Chairmen” (sic) in the UFT, making future such demonstrations far less likely. When the ‘60s bred young teachers entered ghetto schools and found conditions deplorable both within the schools and in the communities they served, particularly in a school system which had come to serve a population that had a majority of “minority” children, when there was even talk of allying the teachers’ union with the Welfare Workers Union and calling a general strike to improve both working conditions and the conditions in which Black and Hispanics lived, Shanker serendipitously found in the Ford Foundation’s Community Control pilot program in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, (shepherded by JFK national security advisor and Vietnam architect, McGeorge Bundy), the perfect means by which to forever purge or immobilize the left within his ranks. The 1968 School Strike drove a wedge between schools and communities, white and black teachers, Blacks and Jews that is still with us. The three-month long strike had been so strident and potentially catastrophic that it came as no surprise that the New York State legislature would bar the union from ever striking again.
Over the forty years since the strike, the UFT, under Shanker and then his protégé, Sandra Feldman and her successors has more or less functioned as a powerful professional organization. Teachers are, after all, basically a conservative lot, and, after 1968 certainly, the radicals, always a minority, were relegated to the sidelines. A constant embarrassment to the union is that in its zealousness to protect teachers’ jobs and tenure, only one or two teachers—out of a total work force of over 55,000—is ever invited to leave the profession, that is, fired. That there are men and women currently standing in front of classrooms who might better be otherwise employed is glaringly obvious. Yet, tenure is almost iron-clad. The union has tried to deal with this through peer mediation and retraining, but such efforts are often ineffectual. Calls for merit pay, which would reward the most successful teachers, are similarly resisted. For the most part, the union insists that all tenured teachers be treated equally. There is some rationale for this, in spite of the layman’s inability to see why poor performers should be treated any differently than they would in the private sector. In theory, at least, a tenured teacher is an individual who has at least a satisfactory higher education, has passed a licensing exam and, typically, a three year long probationary period during which she needs to prove her competence. The rationale further argues (oddly, yet in effect) that teaching is not rocket science and that should anyone pass through the initial hurdles and be found to be less than competent, the blame likely lies not with the individual but with working conditions or lack of professional support. Stiffening this position is, to some extent, the memory, once again, of the ’68 strike, which, on paper at least, had been fought for “due process.”
Teachers’ unions are not easy to love. There is undoubtedly an overdue need for certain reforms and more than a grain of truth in the critiques made by both those inside of the unions and outside observers. Yet none of this is really behind the current movement for charter schools, privatization and the elimination of the unions. Over a forty year career, this writer’s experience in the New York City public schools was that, with rare exceptions, teachers are hard-working, dedicated individuals who love learning and care deeply about their students. Those who work in inner-city schools have special challenges in the form of overcrowding, under-staffing, poor physical plants and lack of adequate teaching tools. One investigator of the charter school movement tellingly found that in a school that housed a charter school, a glaring contrast could be found between the conditions that prevailed among the regular population and those that were found in the charter school it housed where fresh paint, renovated classrooms and lavatories, computers, smaller class size, ample materials and greater guidance made all the difference. If teachers’ unions can justly be criticized for anything, it is for not drawing even greater attention to the need for such accommodations for all students. No, the charter school movement and the attack on public education and public employees’ unions are not motivated by concern for children, rather they are yet another mean-spirited attack designed to place private profit above all else in yet another key sector of American life.

On Being a New York City Driver

2010-04-02T19:58:00.013-04:00

I have driven mountain roads in Vermont that are less treacherous than driving down any of hundreds of miles of supposedly paved streets and highways in the city of New York. Having had recent occasion to travel to the U.S. mainland, that is to say, to New Jersey, I got a lesson in just how corrupt, arrogant, blithely dismissive, elitist and, yes, as far as I am concerned, literally criminal the caretakers of our city, "the greatest city in the world," are. In our neighbor to the west, roads are silken, the lane markings clear in daylight, sparkling at night, bedecked with lovely embedded sapphire reflectors, potholes rare. On a typical rainy night in New York, on the other hand, (and, yes, an older driver I--apparently unlike the city's DOT--am perfectly aware that older drivers have diminished night vision), my hands tense on the steering wheel as I squint through my windshield trying to determine where there is a lane to take. The lane markings have faded to near invisibility. There are no reflectors. Mine is not the only vehicle proceeding tentatively trying to find the right arc, or near careening, trying to stay within lanes that do not exist. But, then I remind myself, I live in a city whose mayor is having a blood feud with the driving public. Fresh paint for traffic lanes is not on his to-do list.

As I thought back to my voyage to East Brunswick, New Jersey, I calculated the initial cost of my journey before I had even left the city. Eleven dollars in EZPass tolls, two charges of $5.50 to go through the Midtown and Lincoln Tunnels. Where does that money go? Aren't the funds raised by tolls supposed to be dedicated to the upkeep of roads? (When I asked my mechanic if he could tell me, his response was, "Don't ask that question. They'll kill you. Besides, I sell lots of tie-rods this way.") The evidence of my senses tells me that not a penny has been spent on our roads, and I'm not talking about seasonal potholes, the alleged ravages of a hard winter. Our roads are in a near-permanent state of (benign?) neglect. To cite just one example among dozens that come to mind, going into Queens from Manhattan, the approach ramp to the Triborough Bridge (Unlike others, I will not dishonor Bobby's memory by attaching his name to an urban ruin.) has been--how to describe this accurately--rutted, caverned, rubbled, cragged?--for years, for as long as I can remember. My Nissan doesn't just stutter, tremble and shake; it is wracked to its core, its shock absorbers tested beyond their limit. One of the richest cities in the world. America's first city.

The various "Authorities" collect millions of dollars and apparently just pocket the money. Talk of opening their books is met with the kind of dark laughter you might imagine would come from the owner of one of the city's carting services if you asked to opt out. There is no outcry except for the sad seasonal plea from New Yorkers to fill those potholes that are destroying their vehicles, sending their hubcaps frisby-ing off to curbside, endangering their own lives and the lives of nearby pedestrians. The answer, when there is one, is a tarpot and a thin skim fated to fail within days.

With the nation, state and city hovering near bankruptcy, we will, of course, be told that there just isn't enough money in the budget to repair our roads. This always raises the question of why repairs weren't made when we were rolling in tax dollars. And, yes, the wearisome rhetoric about stimulus money being devoted to our infrastructure needs certainly comes to mind. We're all holding our breath waiting for that to happen, perhaps concurrent with rubber wheels on elevated trains and bullet trains to East Brunswick?

Nope. I want to see the books. I will risk my life and humbly request that I see where my toll expenditures, gasoline taxes, registration fees, etc., go.

And then there's our mayor, a man who considers himself presidential timber. We have now long been treated to the prospect of one of the nation's richest billionaires having a major snit because he could not get his way on a commuter tax. Even more outrageous, however, is the man's implementation of a series of obvious mandates to his obedient commissioners designed to make driving in Manhattan a hellish experience. Again, there is a sad, vast richness of examples to cite. He has essentially set up virtual roadblocks in Manhattan reminiscent of the barriers separating Gazans and West Jordanians from Israelis. In part, these take the form of the lovely plazas he has designed. Not quite the open plazas of Italy and Spain, these are cement triangles planted in the middle of major thoroughfares such as the one in Times Square where feckless New Yorkers are invited to sit on cheap folding chairs and breathe in the automobile exhaust being expelled from long lines of vehicles stuck in the traffic jams that the squares themselves have caused. Major avenues that once allowed three or four lanes of traffic now accomodate only a single lane. Unbelievably, traffic islands replete with new plantings have now cropped up on these avenues, and, as if the islands themselves do not take up enough space, they are lined with parking spaces so that the one lane through which one is forced to navigate is reminiscent of nothing so much as a the chutes that lead cattle to slaughter. Might as well fill the coffers with parking fees and violations as well; just add them to the nightmarish mix.

Another device recently implemented to cripple traffic is the imposition of bus lanes forbidden to ordinary vehicular traffic. The notion that 34th Street, for example, is still a cross-town throughfare is silly. Like many of the nearby avenues, most of 34th Street now accomodates only a single lane of vehicles. Like Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, the mayor must frolic in his City Hall office, giggling at the world he has created, the pain he has caused his hated outer-borough drivers, basking in the afterglow of virtue he has demonstrated by commuting to work on the IRT for five minutes rather than using his one of his Rolls-Royces. In spite of feeble attempts to pose as a man of the people, just folks, the truth is that everything this mayor does is designed to lubricate the wheels of government for the profit and gain of his cohorts--from planting trees to abolishing smoking in public places to banning transfats and imposing taxes on soft drinks. These are all good things, but to believe that these are mayoral fiats from a self-envisioned benevolent dictator is naive. He has paved over the city with high-rise luxury apartment buildings, fantasizes filling them with his true constituents, and then doing whatever he can to make their lives even more comfortable. A social program for the rich.

No one is more anti-automobile than this writer. I am sure that before our century is out, privately owned automobiles will have become as quaint as typewriters. They are an economic, environmental and social scourge. Just give us a way to get to our destinations that is fast, clean and efficient: trolleys, jitneys, light rail, bullet trains, you name it. Give me a way to get there and I will await the amnesty on illegal possession of the private automobile. What we are in fact being treated to are outrageously regressive taxes on the poorest New Yorkers in the form of higher bus and subway fares, cutbacks in the very forms of transportation they are being exhorted to utilize. The poorest, lowest paid New Yorkers face ever greater chunks of their paychecks going to subsidize a transportation system that exhausts them even before they open the doors to their workplaces. But don't think about switching to a car. It's a battlefield out there.

Not the PBS Version of the Civil War

2010-03-12T14:18:00.002-05:00

One of the few good things about those PBS March fund raisers is that they give us the opportunity to revisit Ken Burns’ epic documentary on the Civil War. Viewed through the lens afforded us by the constitutional crisis facing the country in the post-cold war, post industrial age it is now in raises serious questions about that war’s still unresolved issues. And just in case listening to Shelby Foote once again drawl that the war forever shaped what this country would become—for better or worse—was not chilling enough for you given the political arc the nation is currently on, one could turn to Susan Dunn’s review of Gordon Wood’s latest work, Empire of Liberty, in the current New York Review of Books and read:

“The South, Wood recognizes, stood apart, as many Southerners disdained not only work, which they deemed fit only for slaves, but also commerce and industry. While the North plunged into the future, nostalgic southerners turned to the past, clinging to the agrarian myth of yeoman farmers leading independent, virtuous lives on the soil as well as to the aristocratic idyll of a leisurely, gracious life of family, hospitality, books and slaves on a lovely plantation.”

It took almost one hundred years for this country to begin to dig itself out from the reign of terror against Black Americans initiated after a rigged presidential election ended Reconstruction and withdrew Federal troops from the South. In fact, it was only with the re-introduction of U.S. Army troops and Federal marshals in the 1950s and ‘60s that desegregation and voting rights would be restored. The South, however, has proved itself still unprepared to give up its version of Camelot, a neo-feudal domain in which the teeming masses—both white and black—toil to keep the deserving few in their aristocratic enclaves. The reaction to Reconstruction was terrifying, and the reaction to the New Deal social contract, the counter-revolution initiated during the Reagan administration, is proving to be almost as horrific.
In some ways, what we are now experiencing as a nation is even worse in that the present counter-revolution is no longer restricted to the terrain of the old Confederacy. The Great Migration that took place after WWII made race a national problem. By the late 1960s, the shocking newsreels of delicate white Southern women hysterically shouting obscenities at a handful of black children attempting to enter previously all-white schools were replaced—or joined—by white Northern women no less committed to the task of protecting their school age children from the prospect of rubbing shoulders with their darker brothers and sisters.
The aftermath of those cataclysmic years, euphemistically called the Civil Rights Era, was the destruction of just about every American city of any size. Few Americans can go home again. Where once there was an urban culture shared by average Americans of all classes, there is now the prospect of endless malls, suburban sprawl, enclaves of privilege, some tiny pockets of re-“gentrified” (read white) neighborhoods within the old city walls. Schools in the North are now more segregated than many in the South.
In an age of euphemism, we no longer have ghettos, we have “inner-cities.” The rust belt, large expanses of the old industrialism, are now as much a symbol of a lost golden age for Northern whites as the decaying old plantation houses once were for Southerners. The suburbs created by the baby boomers now have their own problems and have lost their original purpose as bedroom communities for middle class workers who commuted to their jobs back in cities that no longer exist. (New York City even has a billionaire mayor that does all he can to keep the “poor” out of his rose zone, silk-stocking district, literally throwing up road blocks to automobile traffic on Manhattan streets.)
When segregationist Dixiecrats finally switched parties and created the new Republican Party in the South and the white ethnic working class in the North underwent a similar transformation, abandoning their traditional affiliation with the Democratic Party to become so-called Reagan Democrats, it created the impression that, in this country, it is all about race. That impression is, of course, an illusion. Far more deeply embedded in the genome of the nation’s character and its charter documents is fear of the mob.
The founding fathers who finally had their way with their version of a blueprint for a republic and a democracy never imagined a polis that granted universal suffrage or even majority rule. A recurring image in Burns’ Civil War documentary is Richmond, Virginia under siege. Always hovering in the background is the Virginia State House planted on a hill overlooking the city, a reborn Parthenon atop a New World Olympus. Slaveholding aristocrats like Washington and Jefferson took their classical antecedents very, very seriously. Athens, too, had been a slave state. Freedom and liberty were never intended for the illiterate or barely educated masses. They would either not know what to do with freedom, or worse, actually begin to exercise it. For those who preferred to take guidance from the Christian Bible rather than Plato and Aristotle, there was ample evidence that only the mad or the quixotic would attempt to create a world in which all men were truly created equal. “The poor shall always be with us.” History was replete with examples of what occurred when zealots agitated slaves, serfs or workers to take up arms and demand true equality.
And it is never the truly poor who represent a danger. It is the newly well fed, the newly literate, healthy and learned enough to begin to understand the dimensions of the disparity between the washed and the unwashed. Fuelled by the flames of injustice ignited by their new understanding, such men and women are dangerous indeed. Mansions are invaded, destroyed. Privileges are torn away, “the aristocratic idyll of a leisurely, gracious life of family, hospitality, books and slaves on a lovely plantation,” gone. This insight, this immutable truth about what really drives so-called conservative Americans must finally be confronted, namely, the core belief that universal prosperity and a life free of fear—even if so elusive an outcome could be realized—is dangerous and, yes, evil. It is this fundamental belief that explains the outright antipathy to universal health care, to a proper education for all, to adequately funded hospitals, libraries, cultural institutions, to, dare we say it, socialism, or worse, Europeanization.
In such a world view, prosperity itself poses dangers. During boom periods, periods of enormous wealth accumulation, there seems to be little excuse not to address the needs of a society that years of benign neglect have allowed to grow. One obvious way of dealing with an embarrassment of riches, of course, is merely to redistribute wealth to our latter-day plantation aristocrats. (The Bush tax breaks for the wealthiest are a recent example.) This leaves little wealth in the hands of the vast majority or even in federal, state or local coffers to address growing needs. In the closing days of the apparently golden Clinton administration, when an actual surplus had been allowed to accumulate, Bill Clinton looked ahead, (pre-Monica Lewinsky), to a simple agenda, namely the dedication of the nation’s resources to three specific areas—race, education and a modern rail transit system. After a decade of Republican rule, a three trillion dollar surplus had been converted into a thirteen trillion dollar deficit, thereby guaranteeing that there would be no funds for misguided social programs, no Europeanization of our exceptional Homeland.
Even regressive tax structures and foreign wars, however, could not so disastrously impact the common wealth as a financial crisis that was the inevitable byproduct of years of giving prerogatives to the richest Americans to accumulate wealth unbound by any regulation. All of the organs of government—not merely the SEC, but all government watchdogs from the FCC to the FDA to the EPA and the entire alphabet of gatekeepers that had provided some safety from outright profiteering and know-nothingism—had been gutted. This was accomplished by a form of neglect that few could characterize as “benign.” It was an era more accurately called an era of malign neglect in which government regulators seemed at best incompetent, but more accurately devoted to sabotaging the very missions of the institutions they were employed to oversee. This cancer within government came to extend beyond the economic and social health of the nation to its very constitutional framework. It is one thing to appoint an OSHA administrator who will choose to overlook exploited migrant workers losing their fingers on chicken farms, another to appoint an Attorney General of the United States who will look the other way while prisoners of war are being tortured in their cells or “rendered” to clandestine sites to be tortured by foreign governments.
Once upon a time, patrician scions of families of old wealth could be seen pacing the corridors of power in Washington or in the state houses and city halls. No longer do the children of the most affluent now seek positions in government, preferring to stay on the plantation and influence events behind the scene. Government has become too vulgar, too messy. The ground has been ceded to less delicate types and the result has been rampant corruption and decay pretending to be a more populist form of government in which women and minorities have come into the ascendancy. Once upon a time, those who had accumulated great wealth, embarrassed by their riches (or perhaps fretting over putting them at risk at the hands of mobs with pitch forks) built libraries and concert halls and shelters for the poor.

Still the richest nation in the world, even the Great Recession has not stripped us of certain of the trappings of our wealth. There may be calls to close school libraries as extravagances, but while the bookshelves may be emptied, the long shelves of supermarkets, the true icons of American wealth, continue (so far) to be burdened with more varieties of sugar-laden breakfast cereals than anyone can count. Mall parking lots are still full of new cars (though there may be a form of creeping socialism emerging in their homogeneity, four-door Cadillacs being almost indistinguishable from their KIA cousins). It seems that so long as Americans can reassure themselves via HD color TVs and fully stocked stores from which they still have the luxury of selecting some other needless item, they will continue to pretend to be unaware that a new Civil War has been going on right under their noses, as if in a parallel dimension. (That the battle rages while a Black American occupies the Oval Office is a nice irony.) There has not been one Fort Sumter, but many, and ground continues to be lost. The great question facing this country is what will happen when the vast majority of Americans who were raised to believe in the wholesome values they see symbolized in the nation’s flag, and who try to live by them, come to realize that what we are experiencing in this country is truly nothing less than a second Civil War.

So

2009-07-23T13:13:00.001-04:00

Listen to a young scholar being interviewed on a talk show nowadays, and you will more than likely hear at the beginning of almost every response a seemingly mandatory,“So..” At first, this was only an occasional event. Now, just about all those of a certain generation are taken with the mannerism. The prefatory “So” is no doubt an homage to some luminary or luminaries in a particular field of endeavor. It has caught on with a vengeance. Have these kids no shame?

Among all of the other symptoms of conformity one might expect our paradise of individualism to discourage—if not preclude—is a lockstep on vernacular clichés and speech mannerisms. This phenomenon is expected among the young whose hopefully temporary insecurities are somewhat assuaged by speaking the jargon of their set—whether that is the unique speech of the valley girl, the hip-hopper, the geek, the nerd, et al. Something new seems to have surfaced within the last decade or so, however, and the phenomenon seems almost entirely restricted to the class of individuals who once prided themselves on their mastery of the language. Such mastery was a hallmark of having received a superior education.

Although most of the educated avoid “irregardless” in their speech since some English teacher along the way pointed it out as a barbarism, the use of “preventative”—even among young physicians—is widespread. The formerly nice distinction between “further” and “farther,” not a difficult distinction to master, has been found troublesome enough for a whole generation to take the step of just eliminating the word “farther” from its vocabulary. Although I am assuming that most colleges still have speech classes in addition to English classes, many users of “So” are from the same group that finds the (truly painful to the ear) rising cadences of “upspeak” so fetching.

The ease with which certain linguistic fads take root is a phenomenon worth studying. In the aftermath of 9/11, for example, hardly a commentator could be found who had not adopted the truly annoying “At the end of the day…” for frequent use. Did a cataclysmic event invite or even subconsciously impel so gloomy a usage? More important to me, however, is the fact that many show no resistance to these supposed “fads.” We know why politicians twist the language. Orwell made it quite clear, and we have been drowning in double-speak during the Bush years. Conservatives like to mess with people’s minds. But the same individual who would not ever think of his country as “the homeland” or the death of innocents as “collateral damage” seems to have no trouble at all beginning any response that requires a bit of explanation with, “So.”

You know what I’m saying?