Post-Modern Savagery

...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

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

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

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:

1. National Health Insurance.


2. Guaranteed employment for all Americans.


3. Increase in the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour.


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


5. 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.


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


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


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


9. Signing of the Geneva Accords prohibiting attacks on civilian populations.


10. Signing of the Kyoto Accords.


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


12. An absolute prohibition of torture.


13. Reaffirmation of habeus corpus and other safeguards in our constitution.


14. Trials or release for all those held at Guantanamo.


15. 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.


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


17. A jobs program growing out of investment in:




1. mass transit


2. railroads, light rail, trolleys and jitneys


3. public housing


4. school construction


5. repair of infrastructure to include a Make America Beautiful component


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


19. Elimination of all off-shore tax shelters.


20. Removal of all taxes on household items and clothing.


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


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


23. Elimination of the SUV loophole with regard to mileage requirements.


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


25. Federal financing of the public schools.


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


27. 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.


28. Honoring of all treaties made with American Indians.


29. 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.


30. Decriminalization of all drug use.


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


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


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


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


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


36. Feel free to add to this list:

Tick, tick, tick...

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

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

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"

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.

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Moment of Truth

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: April 4, 2011

Vincent Amato, morning of April 5, 2011:

Well, David, you burnt the midnight oil on this one, covered all the bases, doled out the mandatory praise to various Republican leaders and apparently paid your dues to the Party for at least the next twelve months. It is interesting that you restrict your comments to "domestic programs," omitting any reference to the trillion or so spent on a war machine that even the sitting Republican Secretary of Defense argues is too fat. (Republican fretting over spending stops at the doors of the Pentagon.) Although this article, with its praise of Mr. Ryan, would seem to enhance his chances for a presidential nomination, I don't think that is going to happen. Ryan with his altar boy wholesomeness and intellectual patina is a bit too monastic; we'll probably see a Chris Christie candidacy; his is the perfect populist approach.

The substance of the changes you foresee and that you credit Mr. Ryan with introducing seem taken out of the pages of one of Orwell's dystopian novels. Having Ryan "grasp reality with both hands" is a nice novelistic conceit. Just whose reality is that? Even the notion that what the Republican Party is about is "reform" hearkens back to the by now long litany of right wing perversions of language and political metaphor. This is out of the same play book that in the late nineties fancied Soviet communists as conservatives, Republican strongholds as red states, and organized groups of right wing thugs as members of a Tea Party. (The last notion having stronger echoes of the South's confederates making claim to the events which took place prior to our own revolution than the original event.) Most historians trace the origins of social democracy back to the Bismarck regime in Germany. Bismarck, of course, only instituted his social welfare programs as a means of undercutting what he saw as the threat of socialism. With the demise of the Soviet Union, latter-day conservatives obviously sense the opportunity to roll back reforms that date to the 1870s, let alone our own New Deal reforms of the 1930s. The obvious goal is to completely privatize and put on a profit basis all human affairs.

The great irony in all this is that it is precisely the profiteering that goes on in our nation that is responsible for the exorbitant costs of programs that are more government inspired than government run. Our medical costs are twice that per capita of any other nation on Earth while our level of general health is far worse. Republicans conjure up citizens getting expensive CAT scans for bruised knees and otherwise taxing the medical system, while, in fact, the exorbitant cost of the American health care system is a byproduct of a moral set and a value system that finds it okay to profit--and profit enormously--from sickness. Remove the profit motive from the medical and pharmaceutical "industries" in the U.S. and the actual costs would diminish dramatically. Similar savings could be realized by once again empowering regulators at the much diminished FDA or OSHA, for example, to resume their roles as protectors of citizens' health.

And, finally, stop the charade of entitlements going to the rich as well as the poor in some false notion of equality that parallels the distorted distribution of wealth that our grossly unfair tax system has promulgated and encouraged.

(Posted to the New York Times, morning of April 5th. Will indicate later should it be printed.)

The Truth, Still Inconvenient

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.

Recommend Recommended by 6 Readers

Living in the Age of the Shark

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

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

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

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

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.
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