So

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?

HDTV is Highly Dubious

Why has U.S. television gone digital? Have you ever gotten a satisfactory answer to that question? The vista of homes festooned with rooftop antennas that became an icon of modern culture in the 1950s is about to become a thing of the past. It should not have surprised anyone that the transition to digital has not been smooth, and there has already been one postponement. My own somewhat bumpy journey with digital began when a roofer told me that I would have to remove my rooftop antenna because the bolts attaching the antenna to the roof’s parapet were compromising the building’s waterproof envelope. That was disappointing. I have stubbornly refused to subscribe to a cable outlet, and my television reception using the antenna on the roof was perfect. I have always been content to limit my viewing to what was available over the airwaves. Now what to do? I decided that it would be worth a try to just put a splitter on the cable that feeds my broadband internet connection. I am not sure this is entirely legal, but it works just fine, and I found that I was getting NY1 and C-Span as a bonus, two stations that are not typically accessible via a rooftop antenna.

The next phase in this saga came about as a result of my deciding to buy an HDTV, a High Definition television set. At first, I was dazzled by the incredible resolution and deep color that the new set provided. In addition, the tuner in the HD set brought in many more channels than the tuner in my old Sony. In fact, I got a little nervous when I found that I was getting movie channels and documentary channels that only cable provides. My splitter arrangement looked more like theft of services. Within a very short time, however, those premium channels began to disappear. I could only conclude that they had some way of filtering out stuff you had to pay for when they discovered that deadbeats were getting a free ride. Actually, I felt a little better each time one of the so-called premium channels went black. A movie buff, I could not resist watching free junk that I would never have laid down hard cash for in a movie house. The cable company’s vigilance saved me from my darker self.

The longer I live with my new HDTV, the more questions it raises. Let’s start with the technology. You will find, if you haven’t already, that when you auto-program an HDTV, your new TV set has become the receptacle for numerous shopping channels, infomercial channels, evangelical Christian channels and a vast additional array of what can only be called junk television. In addition, the HD tuner brings in a high definition broadcast of many of the major channels as well as what is called a normal cable broadcast. This apparent redundancy acknowledges the fact that not all television stations have the capacity—or the budget—to broadcast in high definition, thus not all cable transmissions are high definition transmissions. The large corporate networks, namely CBS, NBC and ABC, (as well as PBS), have obviously taken pains to showcase HD at its best. Look at a news broadcast or a flagship late night talk show or, God knows, a sporting event, and the quality of the picture is nothing short of dazzling. Resolution and focus are perfect. The picture virtually shines. Cranky types who still play LP records and could never adjust to the alleged “coldness” of CDs will no doubt complain that this new digital technology is too perfect. Most of the rest of us will probably ooh and aah.

On the other hand, if you are watching a digital broadcast in anything other than the HD mode, you will find that the picture quality is absolutely terrible. In fact, it is far worse than the quality of the picture I was enjoying with my rooftop antenna. Even on the big networks, proudly broadcasting their most popular shows in glitzy HD, picture quality is more often than not inferior to transmissions sent out via the airwaves.

Yet another “new and improved” product that is clearly inferior to the original? Obviously, there is digital and then there is digital. Much of what one squints at on a new HDTV has about as much production value as a picture taken on your cell phone or a low level Youtube transmission. Now, I am sure that government and the corporations will assure us that things will get better as more and more HD cameras are used and more stations begin to broadcast in HD, that this is a still developing technology. Maybe. But, for me, there is a far more important issue than picture quality that the move to exclusively digital broadcasting raises—thought control.

This was brought home to me during one of PBS’s ever more frequent fund raisers. A spokesman for PBS stated that one of the reasons they were short of money this year—in addition (of course) to congressional cuts—was that they felt a need to continue to broadcast over the airwaves for a while so that they could reach their whole audience through the transition period. It would cost Public Television an additional 21 million dollars to continue to use their analog transmitters. At this juncture, I recalled images from my childhood in the days of radio when I looked at pictures of antennas with fret lines emanating from them to represent their transmissions, when boys on home-made short-wave radios could put an antenna on the roof and communicate with the whole world. The airwaves. What a wonderful ring that word has! The people own the airwaves. That has a wonderful ring, too. I wonder…just who has the capacity to make digital transmissions? How long will it be before all those remaining rooftop antennas disappear? And when they do disappear, what will that mean for the free flow of information?

If you would like a lesson in the transparency of our democracy, just try finding out what the rationale was for the digital transition. Of course, the stated rationale—put out there for children—is that we will all get better quality pictures on our TV sets. Try to penetrate the deeper arguments, however, and issues of national security begin to appear with great frequency. Even if digital transmission did allow for better picture quality, when did the Reagan era governments of the last thirty years show similar enthusiasm for issuing mandates to private enterprise? The bottom line question raised by all of this is: why did broadcasters need to cease their analog, over the airwaves transmissions?

One Shining Light

Evening skyline along the Grand Central

This deal has been criticized in light of the economic crisis of 2008-2009 and the $45 billion of taxpayer funds allocated to Citigroup by the US Government in two separate rescue packages, prompting New York City Council members Vincent Ignizio and James Oddo to suggest that the new ballpark be called "Citi/Taxpayer Field."

--Wikipedia

“Today we’re introducing the greener, greater buildings plan, a far-reaching package of new local laws that will dramatically improve New York’s energy efficiency and reduce energy costs by some three-quarters of a billion dollars a year,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “This will significantly improve our economic competitiveness, put thousands of New Yorkers to work in green jobs, and do more to shrink our own direct impact on global warming than any other actions imaginable.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announcing the “MAJOR PACKAGE OF LEGISLATION TO CREATE GREENER, GREATER BUILDINGS PLAN FOR NEW YORK CITY” on April 22, 2009.

Name: Citi Field

Site: Next to old stadium in Queens

Cost: $800 million. Mets are investing about $600 million, including $528 million in tax-exempt bonds. The city is spending about $165 million in infrastructure improvements around the stadium. Citigroup will pay $20 million per year for naming rights.

--SunSentinel.com

I don’t usually spend much time thinking about sports, and when it comes to building arenas and stadiums, I just kind of assume the politicians and the monied owners of sports teams are in bed with one another, and will do what they have always done, namely, concoct sweetheart contracts that make the taxpayers—sports fans or no—pay for the bread and circuses while they rake in profits from ticket sales, cable contracts and food concessionaires. But the arrival on the city’s real estate of both a new Yankee Stadium and a new Shea (excuse me, Citi Field or Citi Bank Field) Stadium couldn’t have had worse timing. With all that this city needs, the obscenity of spending a single taxpayer dollar to subsidize arenas in which wildly overpaid (not as much as corporate types, but still) hulks on steroids vie with one another in the sun is difficult to swallow.

The owners of the old Shea Stadium had the decency to reduce it to rubble before the new stadium opened. In the case of Yankee Stadium, however, if you hurry, a ride along the Harlem River Drive will reward you with a view of the old stadium and the new, side by side, cheek to jowl, looking almost indistinguishable from one another. The construction of both new stadiums was completely unnecessary, and in light of the global events surrounding their opening, both edifices will probably forever stand as monuments to an irrational financial exuberance (to coin a phrase) we are not likely ever to see again. In the bad old days, robber barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller built museums and libraries; the acolytes of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan gave me and my fellow Queens residents this to remember them by:

My first real recognition of the pure insanity of this venture came at night, driving down Grand Central Parkway on my way to Flushing. As I approached the area around LaGuardia Airport, I became aware of a halo of garish light on the distant horizon. “My God, what is that?” I uttered aloud. Squinting through the glare on my windshield, I made out the new light display that will (unless some follower of Ayn Rand is available) forever blemish the night sky of Queens. Two thoughts came to mind immediately. First was the Mayor’s exhortation to his followers that they take out all of those wasteful incandescent light bulbs in their homes and replace them with those curlicue jobs that give off such a terrible light. I wearied at the prospect of attempting to calculate how many 40 Watt bulbs it would take to equal the blazing white light of Citi Field’s horrific signage and field lights. Certainly, our Mayor should be informed of the electric changes taking place across the East River in Queens. Certainly, he will want to do something about this:

The halo of light that emanates from Citifield can be seen from far off, and this prompted my second thought—I’ve seen this before, and I can vividly recall when and where. There was a time I was making frequent trips to South Jersey. I would get on the Garden State Parkway and cruise for an hour or so through the pastoral bliss of starry skies, pinelands, grazing deer, busy woodchucks, and then make the turn onto the Atlantic City Expressway whereupon my eyes had to make an immediate adjustment to the OZ-like glare coming from the row of casinos that adorn the shoreline at that location. One turn—from pastoral bliss to whorehouse capitalism.

It was at this point that I had a sinking feeling, a hunch verging on a conviction, that it would only be a matter of time before this first manifestation of the Willets Point “renaissance” would be followed by a proposal to build casinos in Flushing. I promised myself that I would return with a camera and attempt to document this brave new world. My first series of photographs would be taken in daylight, and I would later retrace my path on Grand Central Parkway at night. For the daylight shots, I decided to take the 7 train to the new field, and and begin to tour the new facility. It wasn’t long before I was rewarded with yet another harbinger of a possible incursion by the gambling industry that seemed to affirm my hunch, a large Caesars Atlantic City billboard:

A daytime tour of the grounds soon makes it evident that, with the exception of its main entrance, oddly reminiscent of both the old Ebbets Field and the Coliseum in Rome, the other vistas that the new stadium presents are unrelentingly devoted to the crassest commercialism. Where once the old Shea delicately adorned its circumference with delicate neon line-drawings of players in motion, we now have an explosion of billboard advertising. Across 126th Street, opposite the stadium's Bullpen Gate, are still located the many chop shops and auto parts stores slated for removal as part of the Willets Point renaissance. Protest signs adorn several of the cyclone fences in the area, and indeed this complex--the owners of which have viewed with dark humor the complaints of a city that has redlined the district of all essential city services for years--doesn't look like it is going anywhere soon.

Enemies of the People

When the good Dr. Stockman in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People tries to warn the people of his town that their river is dangerously polluted, he becomes, of course, the eponymous enemy of the very people he is trying to protect. Ibsen, like many other early observers of the devastation brought about by industrialization and the exploitation of the natural environment for profit, understood that an inevitable adjunct of this planet-wide revolution was a “silent majority”. The phrase, (in spite of its having been co-opted by a Nixon administration under siege in the 1970s), is invaluable for its insight into the most profound psychological underpinning of the profit system—denial.

What, after all, do all of the plagues of our time have in common? The automobile, indoor and outdoor air pollution, water pollution, famine, epidemic disease, deforestation, over-fishing of the oceans and rivers, the rapid extinction of species, skyscrapers, jet travel, casual waste of natural resources, even electric light all pose a threat to our very existence on the planet. While on the one hand, we are “treated” to endless jeremiads about where we are headed, there seems to be no plausible solution to the insidious trend. Windmills, nuclear power plants, recycling old newspapers, electric cars and zoos for near-extinct species all seem laughably (or tragically) incapable of making a significant difference. Those who study and understand the full scope of the problems we now face will confess that it is probably already too late to avoid some cataclysmic event that will forever alter our lives on Earth.

Yet, in spite of the gravity of what we are all now facing, there is a conspiracy of silence on its root cause. What is almost never mentioned in the midst of the constant hand-wringing and hair-pulling exhortations in the media and the scholarly journals is the underlying problem—there are just too many people on the planet.[1]

The subject of population growth has a long political as well as scientific history. There was a time when Malthusians, that is, adherents of Thomas Malthus’ ideas about population, were looked upon as reactionary. Left wingers of just about every shade were distinguished by their faith in scientific solutions to all of mankind’s problems. Technology would save us. Population grows geometrically Malthus pointed out, while resources grow mathematically. The technocrats made claim to having defied Malthus’ gloomy forecasts when they devised methods to not only feed existing populations but, as a result of the new regimens they put in place, allow global population to grow by a third. In the process, the ammonium nitrates so liberally applied to the soil have created a huge additional hazard to life on the planet. All indications are that we have not yet seen the end of population growth, that by 2050, we will have three billion more human beings to feed.

What should now be obvious is that Earth simply cannot accommodate such large numbers. Where once—in spite of the usual opposition from the Catholic Church and other institutions that thrive on teeming surpluses of poor people—population control and family planning were corollaries to any program aimed at improving the lot of our species, the subject has become taboo. In fact, declining population is now seen as an economic threat in many advanced nations faced with the prospect of fewer workers to fund social programs for aging citizens. In a global context, the notable exception of China’s so-called one birth policy can be seen as an anomaly. Moreover, the country’s recent surge of affluence has rendered the policy somewhat irrelevant since, as has long been obvious, one effective cure for excess population is affluence. Rich peoples (barring some perceived threat to their group’s existence) don’t have time for babies.

The era in which we were treated to programs for poor nations which included everything from condoms to IUDs to voluntary sterilization ended for a variety of reasons. Reagan era opposition to essentially all family planning regimens led the way, and most of what was then done to remove governmental support from family planning efforts is still in place. The so-called right to life faction, ostensibly opposed to abortion, turned out, not surprisingly, to be disingenuously opposed to all forms of birth control as well. Family planning was portrayed as an insidious cover for advocacy of abortion. In some minority communities here in the United States but in other areas of the world as well family planning was portrayed as a veiled form of genocide for the poor. Population control groups not only lost government funding, they were deemed out of touch with technological changes such as improved fertilizers and genetically modified organisms that would supposedly allow for almost unlimited population growth. In their institutional literature and mission statements, great care is now taken by organizations like the United Nations and other groups with global outreach to emphasize free choice. It has become politically incorrect, even misogynistic, to present a public face that would openly advocate for anything resembling a rigorous program of population control.

The doomsayers of the 1960s who predicted world-wide famine within just a few decades were obviously proven wrong; the population time-bomb never exploded; Malthus was proven wrong once again. Fertilizers and scientifically modified seed could and did feed larger and larger populations. Not included in the calculation, however, was the environmental cost of the new agricultural regimen. It is a cost not measured alone in direct harm to land and water. The parallel phenomena of extinction and chemically induced mutations of still extant species offer a clear warning that, like other species that have been artificially induced to rapidly expand their populations, humans are in danger of becoming dangerous pests, the most dangerous the planet has ever seen.

[1] There are no doubt some on both the right and the left who will argue that we must acknowledge an even deeper underlying problem such as the inequities of capitalism or a lack of spiritual enlightenment. I would argue here that unless the problem of overpopulation is addressed soon, its devastating impact on the health of the planet will render political and religious concerns moot.

Gang Raping the American Working Class

First, they destroyed the unions, they then tore up all the regulations and safeguards designed to protect the citizenry from reckless financial speculation while at the same time instituting the most regressive tax system the country had ever seen. This led to its inevitable outcome: the house of cards came tumbling down, leaving a handful of individuals running for cover with the unbelievable wealth they had been allowed to accumulate while, in the rubble, lay jobless workers and tens of millions of working people with seriously diminished savings accounts and pensions. Most Americans’ homes, their single largest asset, the focus of the bubble (why don’t we call these phenomena boils rather than bubbles?) alleged to have been the core problem, were worth a lot less. But this would be only the first time we were to be ravaged. Within just a few weeks, they would gang on and do it to us again.

For many years, American high school students were taught in their history classes that the one lesson the Great Depression taught us was that capitalism needed regulation. We learned that buying on margin was a thing of the past. You just couldn’t have another depression. There would be no runs on the banks. The Baileys had reined in the Potters. The country had learned its lesson in 1929. We now had an FDIC to insure our savings up to $100,000 per account. The only problem was that by 2008, the savings accounts were empty. The country had a 0% savings rate. After all, only a fool would keep his money in a savings account. Why settle for 0.1% interest at the local savings and loan when you could cash in with a tax-deferred annuity or an IRA or a good mutual fund and make an average of 8%?

Although it would be nice to be able to blame the evil Republicans for this disaster, this proves to be difficult, since both parties were clearly complicit. That the producers of such colorful platitudes as the evil empire and the axis of evil were themselves evil was fairly clear. Should any evidence of Ronald Reagan’s essential mean-spiritedness be called for, one only had to look at his performance while governor of California. The reason that Democrats came to be as likely as Republicans to find in him a miracle worker was that he took an economy which, by the time he took office in 1980, was clearly in crisis and managed—in a fashion that gave him the right to claim full status as a Wizard of Oz—to create an illusion of affluence. If buying time for the system was the goal, he more than achieved it. It was undeniably a miracle of sorts—if one could forgive him for his attack on unions, for his tearing up regulations governing just about every aspect of American life and for his having a philosophy on the environment best summed up in his quip that “A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?” (He does, of course, get credit for bringing down the USSR, a distinction he must rightly share with Pope John Paul II, the Virgin Mary and a moribund Moscow bureaucracy.)

Credit swaps. Hedge funds. Derivatives. Private equity. Collateralized securities. The average American struggling to figure out why our economy now seems on the verge of a depression has by now had the opportunity to obtain at least some superficial familiarity with the heretofore arcane jargon of finance. Of course, most of us still can’t follow what Hank (“Ace”) Greenberg, the former CEO of A.I.G. is talking about during his appearances on the Charlie Rose Show. The sleight of hand that passes for high finance is necessarily couched in enough jargon and enough actual complexity to form a protective shield around the self-styled Masters of the Universe. Most of us are still reeling from the events of those September weeks when Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch were teetering and Lehman brothers was allowed to go under, when we were told that others of the most revered names in investment banking were on the verge of collapse. Why was this happening? How could it happen? And, then, we were told that Hank Paulson, then Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben Bernanke, head of “the Fed,” had determined that only trillions of dollars of taxpayer money could “save the system,” that certain companies were “too big to fail.” They needed the money—and they needed it fast. There was talk of a “complete meltdown of the banking system,” and of “a complete freeze on credit,” that money could no longer flow through arteries that had essentially sclerosed with panic calls on paper that was leveraged as much as 30%. The patient was at death’s door. We had to do something, and we had to do it fast. We could worry about where that trillion (and more like it) were coming from after the patient had stabilized. Most of the people I know started flipping through their dog-eared pages of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. What had once been the regimen applied by (the now reborn) Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs to the crippled former Soviet Union was being administered right here at home. Domestic shock therapy.

Oddly enough, looking back on those events, which took place as the presidential campaign was nearing its conclusion, it is John McCain who seems to have gotten it right. McCain was much ridiculed for stating that the American economy was strong and at least making noises that would indicate his opposition to what we now call the “bailouts.” McCain was simply being a good Republican, a good capitalist and an honest broker for a philosophy long identified with the now apparently quaint notion that failed businesses should go bankrupt and that government intervention in the vagaries of enterprise is to be avoided at all cost. It would take a lot of time listening to the endless parade of economic analysts that we have been treated to in the media for the fact to emerge that, as a result of the Reaganite, Milton Friedmanite, laissez faire regimen that the U.S. economy had evolved into, about thirty percent of the U.S. GDP came to grow out of the financial sector. In other words, 30% of our “economy” was devoted to paper pushing rather than creating anything vaguely resembling durable goods. When McCain talked about a healthy economy, he no doubt meant the other seventy percent. Of course, the productive sector now looks gravely ill, in no small measure the by-product of what some diagnose as a “loss of confidence.” The loss of confidence becomes far more profound, of course, when the populace—both here and around the world—must daily confront the floundering of secretaries of the Treasury and Fed Chairman Bernanke as each attempt at “saving the system” falls short, while jobs are lost, wages fall, pensions and savings disappear, and a volatile stock market which we were all being advised to hitch our wagons to loses half of its value.

It is now clear that the system should have been allowed to fail. The trillions of dollars in bailouts and the recent decision by the Fed to just print another trillion dollars is only serving to impoverish the average American wage earner as well as his children and grandchildren. What did they mean when they talked about saving the system? What system were they talking about? Most importantly, whose system did they want to save? When estimates of outstanding derivative debt published in respectable journals were between 500 trillion and a quadrillion dollars, (That’s a one followed by fifteen zeros. Or, viewed another way, the GDP of the entire world for about twenty years.), who was responsible? Hundreds of billionaires were created through the new financial “products” that an unregulated financial sector “miraculously” produced while the richest country in the world watched its standard of living and quality of life decline, watched its infrastructure collapse, its people go without health insurance, its public schools decline to almost third world status, and its redlined masses more and more turn to every drug from cocaine to an inexhaustible array of junk entertainment. Bread and circuses while Rome burned. The U.S. had become its own economic back yard while factories sprouted in China and the other Asian tigers. All of this took place against a backdrop of a decline in the substance and trappings of a viable democracy. An election that many Americans viewed as a coup d’etat resulted in illegal wars and a Homeland Security ethos that borrowed its name and spirit from Weimar Germany. Pages were torn out of the Bill of Rights, newspapers closed, whistleblowers became voices in the wilderness.

Nevertheless, the opposition party, when it was not itself engineering economic programs that ill served the average American, proved to show little real opposition to the “new” economic order in which the World Bank and the IMF would tweak the dials of the planet’s economies. Of course, many Republicans made the disingenuous argument that the whole disaster could be laid at the door of the Democrat Party. It is a convenient argument, but it is also an argument that has some real merit when one considers the nature of the straw that broke this camel’s back. Democrats stood by while being perfectly aware that their ostensibly noble goal of providing housing for the poor declined into the marketplace savagery of “no doc” or outright fraudulent mortgages. It was during the Clinton administration, after all, that some of the significant regulatory checks on the market were allowed to be dissolved. A leading indicator of the “it’s the Democrats fault” line of argument appeared in a Village Voice article titled, “Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie: How the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history gave birth to the mortgage crisis.” The article appeared on August 5, 2008, one month before the meltdown. The Clinton administration may have been reckless (a hallmark trait of the man at the helm) but merely writing bad mortgages would not have resulted in the ensuing nightmare. Criminal as the behavior of many banks had been, their behavior was not a heavy enough straw. For that, we needed to live in an unregulated market of “collateralized securities,” securities leveraged to previously unheard of levels, securities “guaranteed” by good Republican credit houses as solid
gold, AAA level investment vehicles.

There have been few expressions of remorse or regret; there have been no indictments for the greatest rape of the world’s treasure in economic history. Ever the victims of weapons of mass distraction, we are allowed a collective tsk tsk over con artist Bernie Madoff and the luxury of righteous indignation over the multi-million dollar bonuses awarded by A.I.G to its staff. While we are distracted by headline stories chronicling outrages that total millions or billions, we seem blissfully complacent at the prospect of having to cough up many trillions of dollars to “save the system.” And, by now, it is clear what system it is we are saving and who the beneficiaries of this salvation will be—the very same folks who squandered our resources in the first place. So, if a rape took place when the financial sector allowed our wealth to disappear through their recklessness and blind greed, now a second rape is in progress—in the full light of day—as the perpetrators of the crime are made whole courtesy of the men and women on Main Street.

“But we had to do something,” the chorus keens. People need access to credit, need to borrow to keep business moving. Yes. The answer is obvious. Many economists found a prescription in nationalizing the banks. Socialism! In fact, banks are nationalized or taken over by government regulators all the time without any outcry. And for good reason, a nationalized bank is seen as merely a temporary expedient awaiting re-privatization. No, the obvious solution is not nationalized banks; it is a national bank. John McCain was right all along. Let the evildoers suffer the consequences of their deeds; let them go down as the system to which they all nominally subscribe says they should. Instead of all those trillion dollars being handed over—no strings attached—allowing the financial wizards to pay themselves those much publicized bonuses among other things, let those who need to make loans and have the appropriate collateral to qualify line up at the windows of the Bank of the United States. The clogged arteries of enterprise will be opened and the governance of the people’s bank handed over to honest civil servants making wages more in keeping with their actual service rather than making the wages of steroid-injected super athletes. We’ll even make a profit.

As this is being written, the Times announces that the government is going to buy up bad debt and the Dow is up 300 points for the day. The wizard technocrats are doing their magic again. Yet, in my neck of the woods, hospitals are closing, library services are being cut, the New York State legislature is struggling with a 13 billion dollar deficit and most folks not only feel poorer and are poorer, they are fretfully waiting for the next shoes to drop. Or the next pile on.

This one is dedicated to my brother, Joe.

For thirty years, I have been walking by the air raid shelter sign outside of my apartment building, and I have kept asking myself, "When can I paint over that sign?"

I found the idea of my brother walking by that sign and asking himself that question cosmically amusing when he shared this slice of his inner life with me. I couldn't stop laughing. Then I realized that he is a far more sensitive guy than I am, and he probably had wondered all those years, "Is it safe yet? Is it safe to paint over the sign?" Of course, if one finds the thought humorous, it is the darkest kind of humor, dependent for its laugh on growing up, as he and all of our generation had, of instructions from elementary school teachers to get under our desks as the mid-day air raid sirens blared across sun-filled Brooklyn streets in the 1950s. Even as children we knew that there was already a kind of black comedy in thinking that our school desks would save us from the fireball, from the atomic wind shattering the glass in the classroom windows and spraying us like shrapnel and probably killing us instantly. In truth, we didn't find the thought that funny. It scared us, took a big place in our imaginations and our daydreams as well as our nightmares.

I can recall that as a child I awakened to the sound of fire engines in the street in the middle of the night and imagined instead that what I was hearing was the sound of tanks and that the shuffling sounds of the firefighters in their gear became the sound of invading soldiers. I walked across the cold floor of our flat into my parents' bedroom and woke my father to tell him that I was frightened, that there was an army outside. He had to take me to the window and show me the fire engines and firemen to assure me so that I could go back to sleep.

What prompted my brother to make his confession, you may ask. Well, the Dow finally broke the 7000 threshold, and where it will go nobody knows. We reminisced about what is now being called America's Golden Age, basically, the 1950s and '60s. Our Uncle Vic who left his tenement in East New York and drove down the poetically named Sunrise Highway to a new life in Levittown, America's first suburb for the masses. As a veteran, he got a discount on the $8,000 asking price for his dream cottage on (the equally poetic) Low Lane. Ahh... Levittown. I can still smell the fresh paint, the not entirely dry plaster on the sheetrock, the dewy grass in the morning, the hint of chlorine in the air from the community swimming pool in all of its turquoise magnificence mirroring the uninterrupted deep blue celestial dome overhead. Sliding picture windows--floor to ceiling--looked out on a vast back yard. New appliances. A brick hearth in which one could ignite real logs into romantic flames which one could view from both the kitchen and the living room. A new powder blue Chevy parked in the driveway to convey Uncle Vic to his job at the Grumman plant. Everything was new, looked new, but most especially, smelled new. Escape to Levittown meant that gone forever were the smells of urban decay, of rotting wood, walls that had been asked to absorb too many strange cooking odors, scatological accidents in hallways, too many dead vermin, too much coal dust and chemicals in the air. A new beginning.

Looking at Levittown now, of course, one finds an established suburb, the originally treeless landscape with its newly sodded lawns (on the site of old potato farms) replaced by ample greenery, extensions on the original cottages and asking prices that are no doubt 100 times the original price paid by returning war veterans, prices that reflect inflation and the infamous real estate bubble. Sixty years later, too few of the children of those veterans have stopped to reflect on what it all meant, what price was paid--even for a modest piece of the American Dream. It was a time when the United States, with about 5% of the world's population, contolled about 65% of the world's wealth. When the automobile culture that helped to pay for the dream took the lion's share of such of the world's precious resources as copper and steel and aluminum and chrome to build twenty-foot long finned vehicles with red leather uphosltery and three-hundred horse power eight-cylinder engines that consumed what seemed like endless, cheap supplies of gasoline. Rarely did we stop to consider the remaining 95% of the people on the planet who were barely subsisting on the remaining 35% of its available resources. Those golden days, we were taught to believe, were our entitlement as Americans. Not only would they last forever, things would just get better and better. We never believed that a day would come when we would have to get used to, as another friend put it recently, with more of less, more of less.

But as the bill comes due for our excesses, we may want to give some thought to what the good old days were really like, and the price we have paid. We may want to point out to some of our kids what that old air raid shelter sign meant to us when we were kids, and of waking up in the middle of the night and really believing that the Russians were coming.

Oh, and one other thought: Is it safe yet to paint over that sign?

What Happens When the Other Empire Falls?

The occasion of my first visit to the Soviet Union unfortunately came after there ceased to be a Soviet Union. I never got to see the old regime in its heyday, but, prompted by a friend to visit Russia in February of 1992, just weeks after the fall, I did get to see the first throes of post-Soviet life. A visitor to Moscow at the time almost immediately became aware of hundreds of impoverished women lining the streets and the main thoroughfares of the city. Given what is happening to this country's economy at the moment, (as of this writing, the Dow is threatening to go below 7,000, a 50% drop from its glorious 14,000 outing), I have begun to wonder if we will see here in the U.S. long lines of older women (and some men) selling their household wares in the streets merely to obtain enough cash to put bread on their tables. The Evil Empire fell in 1991. It seems to have take the "victors," presumably The Good Empire, (of late, The Axis of Good), to itself go spinning into an economic black hole.

So far, there have been few protests, few workers have taken to the streets. Of course, there are often hints that it will happen from various of the talking heads on the media. Not alarm, yet. Just hints. As there are hints that our government is fully prepared for such an eventuality--a division called back to the states to be in reserve for issues of domestic stability, internment camps, etc. Just hints, but we have had in Guantanamo an off-shore dry run for what it takes to maintain such facilities, and I am sure that there is a line in the military budget to cover the costs.

One problem U.S.-style babushkas may have selling their wares is that most Americans are already drowning in (mostly China-produced) junk. So much so that Oprah has to have psychotherapists on her show to deal with crazed housewives who have taken every bit of space in their homes, attics, basements, garages with the booty of endless shopping excursions. Just about all of us have way too much stuff. Whoever has the most stuff when he dies, wins. When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. A consumer economy. Have we ever paused to consider what that phrase means? An economy that is based on people buying a lot of crap. What do Mom and Sis do when they need to bond? What do we do when we are feeling a little depressed? What do we do when our electronic ticklers, our HDTVs, Iphones, Blackberrys, Xboxes, etc. have failed to satisfy? What do we do when professional sports (now somewhat cheapened as an experience by news that all of our heros have been doping themselves), amusement parks (redundant?) and cruises aren't cutting it? We go SHOPPING. Let's go shopping! Where are you going? I'm going shopping. Is there a town in China named Sha-ping?

Yes, the show is just about to begin. Where is Milton Friedman now that we need him?

There Is No Cordon Sanitaire--Anywhere

The notion of a cordon sanitaire, a perimeter invulnerable to attack, is no longer a viable one. The French learned this the hard way, as German forces merely flew over and around the Maginot Line. For the United States, both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were seen as separating and protecting us from Europe's and Asia's long histories of internecine warfare. Even during the Cold War, when inter-continental missiles bearing nuclear warheads became a grim and frightening reality, the U.S. nevertheless maintained an illusion of isolation from the old world's conflicts in the form of imminent land invasions or even attacks by the thousands of nuclear missiles that the Soviet Union had in its arsenal since we believed that our policy of MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, would, barring the unthinkable, shield us from harm. This illusion of a cordon sanitaire was maintained--until the events of September 11, 2001.

Now, suddenly, the atmosphere of freedom from old world strife, in a nation whose mainland had escaped essentially unscathed by two world wars in the bloodiest of centuries, wars that had targetted civilian populations in the old world's greatest and richest cities, now, was replaced by a feeling of vulnerability. American exceptionalism was over.

For centuries in Europe and Asia, neighbors made the fiercest enemies, but here in the U.S. where Canada lies to the north and Mexico to the south, there has been no exchange of gunfire across borders for a long time. The one time in recent history when the U.S. had to face the prospect of an enemy in its "back yard," the period of the Cuban missile crisis, we showed ourselves willing to go to the brink of nuclear holocaust rather than live cheek to jowl with a hostile force. Our having successfully negotiated our way out of that modern day threat to the Monroe Doctrine led many Americans to believe that ours was a permanent sense of security--until, of course, that shocking day. In the aftermath of that day, our nation has been transformed. We were tense in a way we had never been before--and our language reflected it. The use of "homeland," for example, seemed a page out of the German lexicon, close to Fatherland, even closer to heimat. Our security plan was titled "the Patriot Act," and a host of terms that seemed to come more out of a propaganda ministry than to rise organically as descriptions of reality began to emerge. Euphemism and Orwellian language were not enough, however, to long conceal or disguise what was really meant by "agressive interrogation," or "rendition," or "collateral damage," among many others. If, as we have been told in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, a nation's economic health is based on confidence, it had become clear that its political health was equally dependent on confidence, rather than fear, and we had clearly lost it.

There is only one other nation in the world that seems to believe it can arrange its affairs so as to maintain a cordon sanitaire between itself and its enemies, and that, of course, is Israel. Although Syria and Lebanon are still problematic, Israel behaves as if it has transformed Egypt into Canada and Jordan into Mexico. For the Israelis, the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank are their Cuba, small islands that function as proxies for larger, more menacing national entities farther off. The constant onslaught on the Palestinians seem somewhat akin to successful Bay of Pigs operations seen through this lens. It would take nothing less than a paradigm shift for Israel to project a two-state solution in which (the now unimaginable) prospect of a Palestinian state with an air force and a viable military force lived in their midst. Another obvious manifestation of this same mode of thought can be found in Israel's determination to maintain itself as the sole nuclear power in the Middle East and beyond to its other Islamic adversaries. Israel behaves as if it had its own Monroe Doctrine in its area of the globe.