Gang Raping the American Working Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This one is dedicated to my brother, Joe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Happens When the Other Empire Falls?

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

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

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

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

There Is No Cordon Sanitaire--Anywhere

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

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

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

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

Ban the Car!

As the world seemingly helplessly awaits the environmental devastation that will follow upon the introduction of millions more automobiles in China and India, a rare window of opportunity has opened here in the United States. To use one of the captive clichés of the moment, a crisis can represent an opportunity. GM and Ford are virtually bankrupt. Deservedly so given their sociopathic extraction of profits from gas-guzzling SUVs over the last two decades. Rather than re-tool for more fuel efficient automobiles, (a feat everyone acknowledges they could never do as well as the Japanese in any case), they should begin now to turn their manufacturing potential to the construction of rail cars and other modes of public rapid transit.

It is all but certain that one hundred years from now (assuming the planet survives) the era of the privately owned and often single driver ridden automobile will be looked upon as a time when mankind irrationally put profits before the physical and mental health of the planet. Driven by sheer arrogance and greed, the industrialized nations (most egregiously here in the U.S.) disinvested in and even conspired to destroy a range of mass transit ranging from the old and efficient urban trolley systems toailing subway systems.

To look at photographs of the streets of Beijing, for example, just a few short years ago, with tens of thousands of Chinese citizens riding bicycles through the city’s broad thoroughfares, and compare them to current photographs which show those same thoroughfares now clogged with private automobiles is a tragedy in the making. Beijing’s air is already among the most polluted of all major cities. Within just this short time frame, respiratory diseases and obesity have risen in China. When challenged on pursuing such a course, China, along with the rest of the developing world, glares back at our hypocrisy. We have spent decades banging the drum for the American model of prosperity, and now that it is within their reach, the developing nations seem stubborn in their determination to be just like us—regardless of the costs. We have set a dangerous example.

The election of an African American to the presidency, married to the descendant of a slave, has pleasantly surprised people around the globe. We have shown how, in the worst of times, the nation has the ability and the will to recreate itself. How impressive would it be if the United States—long as much identified with flashy chrome and fin-laden gas-guzzlers as with Cokes, Levis and Marlboros—should renounce the waste of the past, acknowledge the private automobile as a luxury the planet can no longer afford, and turn its productive capacity to the creation of a mass transit matrix that would make even the Japanese with their clean, safe and efficient bullet trains, envious?

“What about all of those employed in the auto industry and its satellites?” The estimated three million jobs in the industry could easily be employed in the manufacture and maintenance of thousands of vehicles of mass transit. Only the extortionist oil corporations and insurance companies and the irresponsible advocates of planned obsolescence will suffer—a fate long overdue for them. A capitalist version of a car-free modern nation is possible. Profits can be realized, just as they once were in the rail and trolley age. Socially responsible profits, that is.

“How will you wean from their cars the tens of millions of Americans who have come to associate their cars with fundamental freedom of choice and freedom of expression, almost a God-given right?” Since we have no commissar of transportation who could merely make the automobile illegal by mandate, the public will have to be educated to the real costs of maintaining the present course. In addition to the initial cost of purchasing a vehicle, add the cost of fuel, maintenance, insurance, bridge and highway tolls. Add the loss of over 42,000 deaths each year (down from its 1970 high of nearly 55,000, a figure that matched the total loss of Americans in the Vietnam War each year) and the countless others who are injured. Add the liability and medical insurance costs. Add the cost of roads and infrastructure. Add the damage to the environment, the air pollution and the quality of life in cities and towns. Add the waste of precious and limited natural resources that will never be recaptured. Add the tendency to urban and suburban sprawl and poor planning that grows out of the necessity of incorporating the automobile into the equation. Add the noise. Add the parking tickets. Then imagine being unburdened of all of this and being able to walk a short distance and board a modern, fuel efficient and quiet mode of transportation that will get you wherever you want to go in a fraction of the time it currently takes. Just imagine. Science fiction? A utopian dream? No, one way or another, it is our inevitable future. And, who can tell? The American people may find healthier outlets for their desire to express themselves.

The Cure: Part II

As one observer has put it, "If the whole world wants to live like the United States, the planet is doomed." The fact is that having even one nation like our own, with a mere 5% of the global population, consume as much of the world's resources and, in the process, create so much waste and pollution is dangerous enough. The prospect of China's (at least until now) growing middle classes all acquiring automobiles is a frightening one. In just the last five years or so, Beijing's roads, once crowded with bicycles, have begun to be clogged with traffic. Less exercise and a fatter diet have produced a new generation of Chinese children plagued by childhood obesity. Needless to say, air pollution in Beijing has worsened. Progress?

Just as Einstein's scientific discoveries led to nuclear weapons, the introduction of methods to create relatively cheap, internal combustion-driven, privately owned vehicles has led to wholesale devastation. The automobile creates pollution in myriad ways. It has allowed urban and suburban sprawl to eat up more and more of our landscape; it uses up very high percentages of the world's natural resources both in its operation and in its manufacture. Not content with making such an innovation merely a means of transportation that could be privately owned by individual citizens, the industry here in the United States put forth the automobile as a status symbol. Even if an argument could be made that having individuals owning and driving their own vehicles, willy-nilly, as their impulses led them, a rational approach would have dictated a simple machine that was safe, got good mileage and lasted indefinitely--basically a Volkswagen with brains. Opposition to this approach, (which, frankly, I cannot recall any real voices for), came from the obvious sources--the automobile companies and, of course probably most significantly, the oil companies. For the average American, the right to own and operate an automobile is God-given. It is not merely a symbol of freedom, it is an enabler of freedom--freedom of movement, freedom of choice, freedom to be frivolous if one wishes with one's own hard-earned cash. As a status symbol, the automobile has no parallel. A small luxury apartment on wheels--leather upholstery, climate control, sterophonic sound, DVD players, GPS instruments. It is probably safe to assume that, for many Americans, the interior of their automobiles is far better appointed than the interiors of their homes or apartments. Thus, the automobile is the ultimate escape. It does on a far broader scale what fashion and cosmetic ads do for women--create an alternate universe that is uncluttered, clean-lined and unrelated to the grungier, sweatier aspects of being a living organism.

The Obvious--and Unspeakable--Cure for the Economy

Think monorails, bullet trains and trolley cars. Think the abolition of the privately owned automobile. Then think clean air, freedom from petrofuels and economic rebirth. Go ahead, city-dweller, look outside your apartment window and find that there are no vehicles parked on the street any longer. Suburban and rural America, look a bit farther and see that where once there were highways clogged with automobiles, the former roads have become the paths of monorails and bullet trains. The air is clean, and it is quiet now. Peace and reason have been restored.

I have watched them all, all the talking heads on C-Span, CNN, Charlie Rose; I have watched Paulson, Bernake, Greenspan, Krugman, even the two Greenbergs, "Ace" and "Hank". All of them talk of a credit crisis, of investing in banks which will in turn give loans to "small businesses" and "individuals." On the one hand, we are told that a depression has been averted. On the other hand, there are tough times ahead, a recession that can last--depending on which head is speaking--anywhere from eighteen months to five or more years. It should come as no surprise to any U.S. citizen that thirty or forty percent of our GDP has come from "finance" over the last few decades. While the scam lasted, those astute enough to have ties to the financial world were accustomed to getting 35% returns on their investments. Unlike the robber barons of old, however, the creators of the vast fortunes that were accumulated left no monuments akin to the libraries, museums and other public venues that we associate with the older barons. Instead, what we became used to was disinvestment in the social good, an almost infinite imagination for waste of the nation's treasure through the purchase of cheap goods, so-called McMansions and gas-guzzling SUVs.

Ultimately, there will be only one remedy for the crisis--government investment in infrastructure. It is a notion that is often pooh-poohed since "it will take too long to matter." The obvious objection to government investment in infrastructure is that it smacks of socialism. Those old enough to remember or educated enough to have learned about the Great Depression can recall the WPA, Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, which put thousands of Americans to work and helped to build infrastructure which the nation still utilizes today. The WPA, of course, was described by conservatives as socialistic (if not communistic) in nature. Although one can currently get away with talking about "nationalizing" banks and other institutions, this term, until lately used mostly in sentences that also contained the words Venezuela and Chavez, became acceptable since it was the richest elements in the country that were the beneficiaries. Of course on the spectrum of acceptability, nationalism is more acceptable than socialism in the United States--for now. Note, however, how little time it took for the former term to work its way into the public consciousness when no alternative seemed available. I would predict that a similar fate awaits the notion of socialism. The counter-revolution led by the Reaganites, the Thatcherites and the Friedmanites will prove, fortunately for the fate of the nation--and the planet--to have been short-lived. And for the same reasons; the planet can not survive the planned obsolescence and other capitalist schemes driven by greed at the expense of public health and safety.

To be continued...

The Rape of America

The American financial "system" has brought shock therapy to our own shores with a vengence. A Nuremberg style trial should await all those who participated in the greatest theft of a nation's resources in the history of finance, yet that is unlikely to happen in a country with one party rule, particularly when the elected representatives of both parties have been bought by the very same participants in the theft. Under the present political arrangement, the citizenry is essentially powerless to protect its interests. Any hope for a remedy is now years, perhaps decades in the future. The candidates of both parties have reacted to the financial crisis with warnings of the further sacrifices that average Americans will have to make. While McCain, (who revealed his true disdain for the democratic process when it gets in the way of his ambition by selecting as his running mate an individual who believes in creationism and speaks in tongues), is deeply embedded with the same constituencies who could tolerate the demise of constitutional government over the last eight years, Obama is merely the fancy creation of the old Northeastern Republican establishment. The Democrats are not an opposition party as much as they are in the business of maintaining the illusion of choice. It is an illusion that will now be even harder to maintain. Stripped of that illusion, the United States' truly oligarchical nature should become clearer and clearer--even to our heavily propagandized electorate. What is called for now is the creation of a people's party.

Democratic Convention Anti-climax

It is a symptom of the time in which we live that the Democratic convention currently taking place in Denver has been almost entirely cleansed of any real conflict--or reality. This is, of course, an historic moment, the nomination of the first Black American for the office of president. And, yes, there is a palpable tension suffusing the event as the nation waits to see if race will spell failure for the Obama candidacy. For some, this is tension enough perhaps. On the other side of the same coin is a sense that this may be too good to be true. Many Americans dare not--not quite yet--savor with anticpation the excitement that would attend an Obama victory in November. We shall see. Tension enough for any one year may be the decision made by those who craft these events.

It is also true that if we look back to conventions past, what has typically taken place in the arenas housing such events is a lot of silly behavior--silly hats, signs, painted faces, balloons, oompah music, the works. While some may recall the floor fights that have taken place over seating various Southern delegations, or anti-war chants, or tense negotiations over votes, those old enough to recall those phenomena have now lived long enough to know that the 1960s were a special time not likely to soon be repeated. This year is the fortieth anniversay of the 1968 Chicago riots. In those days, we watched not just the convention floor, but the demonstrations in the streets, demonstrations in which scores were injured by an overzealous Chicago police force set loose upon hippies, yippies and more serious protesters by the inimitable Mayor Daley. Daley's tactics provided the occasion for one of the most memorable moments to take place at any convention--the heroic cry of protest made by the usually urbane senator from Connecticut, Abe Ribicoff in which he accused Daley of employing "gestapo tactics." It was a response so appropriate to the moment that David Brinkley announced the gesture as "gutsy." None of this can take place in the present climate because if the rulers of this nation learned one thing from those years, it was that it had to repress such expression--and it has done so completely, surgically. Naomi Klein likes to make the connection between the policy of "shock doctrine" and the actual use of shock therapy for its effectiveness in sedating troublesome individuals. We have been sedated.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/abrahamribicoff1968dnc.htm

And, thus, though perhaps we can forgive stage sets that resemble those of game shows, though we can forgive the usual hoopla surrounding conventions, the balloons and the music, the platitudinous, condescending rhetoric, what we should not be so ready to forgive is the surgical removal from the convention of just about any reference to the tens of thousands dead Iraqis, the trillions misspent, the dissolution of constitutional safeguards, the police state apparatus, the destruction of government institutions designed to regulate against excess the profiteers and protect the citizenry, the outright corruption and theft that has so particularly, so poignantly, characterized the last eight years.

Just as the government learned from the war in Vietnam that it is dangerous to have real coverage from the battlefields of our adventures overseas and began to limit news from the battle lines, to "embed" journalists with the troops, it has also learned that disingenuity, euphemism, double speak, if necessary, pure drivel is preferable to real political discourse. At least one stolen election, a multi-billion dollar security apparatus which we were asked to believe lost track of terrorists taking flight training, a "war" (oh, how we love that word) on the terrorists whom we could seek out, if we really cared, with good, old-fashioned police work, two sovereign nations attacked thousands of miles from our shores,with threats against a third, and a kind of rampant corporate theft that has created the greatest gap between rich and poor in the history of the planet--this is the legacy of the last eight years.

As I write, there are a couple of evenings left to this convention. We shall see.

Kosovo vs. South Ossetia

Did the Bush administration really believe that the Russians would take the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without a response? It is interesting to note the reaction of our secretary of state to the declaration by Russia that it is granting recognition to South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states. She and the rest of the administration she serves apparently believe that it is still 1992, that perhaps it would always be 1992 and that a debilitated Russia shorn of its empire would forever remain docile and in a state of shock. And, although relations between Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R. were less than close, it is hard to believe that the caper the U.S. and some of our European allies, particularly Germany, acted out in the course of bringing democracy to such stalwarts of the philosophy as Croatia and Slovenia could fly today as it did in the immediate aftermath of the cold war. One lasting heritage of our intervention in Kosovo under the Clinton administration is Camp Bondsteel, perhaps the largest U.S. military compound in the world.

When Kosovo, considered the spiritual locus of Serbian culture, declared its independence from Serbia, the U.S. rushed to recognize its independent status, and most of our Eropean allies followed suit. On the other hand, when South Ossetia and Abkhazia declared their independence from Georgia, Ms. Rice stated that the move would not stand, that it was a violation of Georgia's "territorial integrity." A short time after Tblisi launched a rocket attack on South Ossetia, President Bush got out of his ringside seat at the Beijing Olympics for a few moments to declare that the Russians seemed confused, that the cold war is over as is the era of "spheres of influence," an artifact of the nineteenth century. For the leader of a nation that maintains one thousand U.S. military bases around the world to declare that the era of spheres of influence is over offers a rare linguistic challenge. How characterize such a statement? Disingenuous? Chutzpah? Orwellian? And for whose benefit would such remarks be made?

Death of a Christian Knight

Communism had no greater foe than the Catholic Church. From the time of the Reformation and, later, the period of the French Revolution, Rome understood that its battle with those who marched under a red flag posed what is nowadays called "an existential threat" to its existence. Although liberty, equality and fraternity had been put to rest in 1815, two hundred years of seething ferment in the West ultimately produced the Russian Revolution and the very real possibility of the old guard being entirely eradicated around the globe.





Now, not quite twenty years since the demise of what some might call the great socialist experiments, those of all political coloration have begun to come to terms with what appears to be the victory of "free enterprise" in every corner of the globe with the exception of such roaring mice as Cuba, North Korea and the Islamic protestors against modernism. Most of us were taken by surprise. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, who on the left would have, could have predicted the demise of communism? Yet, when it occurred there was no shortage of those who would make claim to having foreseen its inevitability. The New York Times celebrated the occasion by giving space on its first page first to one of its own, the late R.W. Apple, who called it the greatest historical event since the revolutions of 1848. Then, upping the ante, the Times gave the same space to Solzhenitsyn, who proclaimed that what we were witnessing was not merely the fall of the Soviet Union but the demise of the whole romantic revoltionary tradition, that what events illustrated was that the ideals of the French Revolution of 1789--liberty, fraternity and equality--were at bottom incompatible.





There have been many candidates for hero of the counter-revolution--from Pope John Paul II to Ronald Reagan, from Milton Friedman to Margaret Thatcher--but many Americans will harbor the not so secret suspicion that but for William F. Buckley and his influence, the hammer and sickel might still be waving above red square and half the people on the planet.



Bill Buckley was indeed the ultimate Christian knight, so much so, in fact, that I suspect he knew the truth about himself and his movement. He was too much of a gentleman to tell a really big lie.

The truth is that none of these figures can truly take credit for the victory of capitalism. That capitalism wins all of its battles through the reckless application of capital itself. Money talks.

On the Other Hand...

not all of the apparatchiks of the Bush administration are without ego. R. Nicholas Burns can be counted on to function as the official liar of the White House. He is a champion at disinformation presented with a winning smile. He is also proof that there is in fact a permanent government, since Burns served as ambassador to Greece.

When Israel was bombing the hell out of Gaza and then invaded Lebanon, it was little Nickie's role to repeat as many times as he could in as many media venues as would have him, "Hezbollah started it." This is the dark side with a smiley face label.

Although he has supposedly resigned from public service roles which essentially had him looking for ways to antagonize reason in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, he has surfaced to go on the record in support of Kosovan independence. This should be rich. If anyone wants to know what is really going on in that section of the world, read Chalmers Johnson. In his work, he alludes to the fact that the military base in Kosovo (a five star accomodation for our fighting men and women) is in a class with the Great Wall of China for the ease with which one can spot it from outer space.

Even Jeffrey Sachs' "shock treatment," it appears, was not enough to entirely subdue the Russians, so now we will really teach them a lesson. We have more sabers rattling through the air right now than a performer at the Peking Opera. Missiles in Belarus and the Ukraine, Kosovan independence, shooting down errant satellites. Prod the Russians enough, and who knows, we could get a real war going.

Who Are Those Guys?

You know, when men in real authority need attack dogs, the quality they most seek is loyalty. A corollary of loyalty of the kind that is required to carry out dirty jobs is a high threshold for disapproval. There are men who are used to not being admired for their charm, who, knowing this, will be determined to succeed, to allow success to serve as compensation for lack of grace. Such men are dangerous men. They simply don't care what people think of them. In Gonzales, Chertoff and Mukasey we have men who are emblematic of the type.

Need to work outside of the constitutional framework, Mr. President? No problem. Need to stonewall, temporize, resort to equivocation, be disingenous, use Orwellian language? None of these are a problem. I'm the man for you.

If the day comes when I have to fall on my sword, swallow the bitter pill, you will be able to count on me. I will take the bullet for you.

This will not make me attractive, not make me appear heroic in the eyes of most men, but they always looked upon me with disdain in any case. What I will get in return is a page in the history books. What I will get in return is the opportunity to be in a position of such power that I will be able to put some of the charmers in their place. What I will get is the sweet smell of the power trip that I could not get any other way. When I enter a Georgetown restaurant, the taste of the Bordeaux will be all the sweeter for the knowledge that there are men and women in the room who recognize me and who recognize in me the power to destroy.

The Fears of Stoddard Linger

Rather than see a decline in the birth rate as a good thing, nations in such "straits" often turn to economic incentives aimed at inducing their citizens to procreate. Someone out there may be writing to the effect that a decline in the population (both its rate of growth and its actual numbers) should be celebrated, but if so, I have yet to come across such sentiments. There is plenty of evidence on the other hand of panic setting in in various European capitals (or their offshoots in the former colonies) when there are fewer white babies being born:


Germany Plays With Procreation’s Price Point
By Mike Nizza
Tags: aging, europe, foreign affairs


Days after The Lede’s look at declining birth rates in countries around the world, from Asia to the United States to Europe, The Financial Times is reporting some contrarian news on fertility from Düsseldorf, Germany:
In the first quarter of 2007, nearly 15 percent more babies were born in Düsseldorf than in the same period last year. The Kaiserwerther Diakonie, one of the city’s three large hospitals, reported a rise in births of more than 16 percent in the first half of the year.

While noting that it is too early to declare a trend, The F.T. nonetheless lists some possible explanations for what a German newspaper is calling “a new baby boom.” Along with a stronger local economy that is attracting young couples, a policy known as Elterngeld is held up. The Elterngeld program now offers subsidies of as much as 25,200 euros ($34,700) a year to mothers who bear children in the year 2007 and beyond. Before this year, the subsidy was set at 7,200 euros ($10,000), leading to reports that mothers were delaying labor in December 2006, hoping to qualify for the extra cash by giving birth in the new year.
Germany’s policy was inspired by its Scandinavian neighbors, who offer even more munificent benefits to new mothers. They also enjoy stronger birth rates. A BBC graphic outlines Europe’s various offers.
The possible success of the higher payment in Germany and elsewhere in Europe prompts a question of procreation’s price point. How much would it take to induce you to have a baby? And can your government afford to fuel a new baby boom while taking care of the original baby boomers?


Supposedly, the economic pressures to maintain population growth are real. That is to say, if we put aside purely blatant racism as the motivation to encourage essentially white demographics, various arguments are made the aim of which is to convice us that not only is a growing population a good thing but also a necessary thing. Among those arguments is the notion that great powers must have large populations. Another is that, as populations age, that is, as the older citizenry represents a larger and larger percentage of the total population, more babies must be produced so that they can pay for the maintenance of their elders through the various tax or social welfare programs. Of course, from the perspective of a consumer society, there is yet a third factor--and perhaps this is the most important--fewer people mean fewer sales.

In the ensuing segments of this essay, I will try to address each of these factors. I will only say here that all of these factors must be measured against what I consider to be the over-riding issue, namely, there are just too many people on the planet right now. Sooner, rather than later, the disastrous impact of the estimated six billion of us that presently tax the resources of our planet will undoubtedly make itself felt, perhaps in ways that we have not yet been able to imagine. A paradigm shift is necessary if human life is to be sustained in a manner that allows us to cohabit with rather than exploit to the point of extinction the organisms with which we reside.

Population Control: Good Old Days

In the good old days, books could--without fear of reprisal--be titled, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. Lothrop Stoddard's book would achieve a kind of immortality it would not otherwise have had when F. Scott Fitzgerald presented his portrait of a certain strain of WASP American in The Great Gatsby:


“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. "I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we——”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

Perhaps it was legal considertions that forced Fitzgerald to thinly disguise the Stoddard work. He may have altered the name of the author and the title of his work, but Fitzgerald was not fabricating contemporary attitudes toward non-white peoples. This was also the period in which the eugenics movement had begun to flourish here in the United States, and Jack London could unblinkingly write of "The Yellow Peril." The concluding sentences of that work have echoes in current political reality:

The world is whirling faster to-day than ever before. It has gained impetus. Affairs rush to conclusion. The Far East is the point of contact of the adventuring Western people as well as of the Asiatic. We shall not have to wait for our children's time nor our children's children. We shall ourselves see and largely determine the adventure of the Yellow and the Brown. (Italics mine.)

It is interesting that though he titled his essay, "The Yellow Peril," London did not fail to include the similar threat posed by the growth of the "brown" races. A bit later in the twentieth century, however, the racial policies of the Nazis and the Fascists gave such phrases as "white supremacy" and the "master race" decidedly horrific connotations, and such terminology fell from use--at least in polite public discourse.

The truth is, however, that discussions of population control are still regularly cast in terms of race or ethnicity. In addition, given capitalism's need for markets and cheap labor, one would be hard pressed to see in print--or in any other medium--the advantages of a nation or the whole globe, for that matter, limiting population growth. Religion, race, politics and economics all come to play in discussions of population. Viewed strictly in terms of the health of the planet, this should not be the case. The very term ecology implies that there is some ideal balance of population, available resources and the health of the ecosystem.

What the environmentalists of our own day make painfully clear to all but those who profit from ignoring the reality is that there are too many automobiles, too many smoke stacks, overproduction of agricultural products, overfishing of the seas, disastrous incursions into wetlands areas, virgin forests and rain forests, scarcity of potable water, irresponsible building of dams...

(To be continued)

Population Control III

While popular journals of the 1960s were showing more and more of the planet going "red" and it looked like the Soviet Union would encroach on more and more of the planet, a threat emerged that, in the opinion of many self-appointed protectors of the "free world" represented at least as onerous a threat: the pill. For a brief period of time, this chemical innovation threatened to undermine one of the bulwarks against anarchy, chaos and communistic "free love" -- the fear and trembling associated with sex and unwanted pregnancies. The Catholic Church, long a leader in the campaign against sex without fear, long a leader in the campaign against the dangers of self-realization at the expense of patriarchy and authoritarianism, and just as long in favor of the pacifying effects of submission and obedience, was at the forefront of the battle against family planning. In the more developed world, nominal Catholics disregarded the injunction against contraception with abandon. The oxymoronic anathema placed upon the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy while, at the same time, prohibiting women from taking steps to avoid unwanted pregnancies was not lost on many of the otherwise faithful. But, just as the Catholic Church and its allies in other religions had sought to make their theology a matter of law with regard to abortion, that is, prohibited to all, not merely their own flock, it followed a similar course with regard to birth control. That position, more a political than a theological one, has come to fruition in the administration of George Bush, whose programme has emerged as one of the most reactionary since the Spanish Inquisition--torture and all.



Even prior to the current Bush regime, however, the battle against rational family planning had been furiously pursued. Starting at the time of the Reagan administration one heard less and less about birth control or population control. Abortion here in the U.S. was portrayed by segments of the Black community (who, in fairness, had been the tragic victim historically of various sexual experimentation) as a covert form of genocide. Population control efforts in India, for example, were at the same time, portrayed as racist or misogynistic. When China, historically alarmed at the prospect of feeding its billions, resorted to its one-child policy, the policy was depicted in the West as a fascist-like intrusion into the lives of its citizenry, with scenes of women being dragged to abortion clinics out of their rural cottages frequently shown on Western television.

What all of the propagandizing against population control efforts could not accomplish--the moral inveighing against abortion, the alleged dangers of the contraceptive pill, the intra-uterine device, the diaphragm, vasectomy and tubal ligation--the emergence of the HIV/AIDS crisis did. The era of sex without fear was ended with a vengence. This was so much the case, the disease had begun to take so many victims, that there were some who saw in the mysterious emergence of this modern plague the shadow of conspiracy. Traditonal opponents of birth control had always had as another of the tenets of their faith the injunction against homosexuality. The politicization of sex was interwoven into the fabric of law here in the U.S. There were laws against sodomy and antimiscegenation just as there were laws against the mere distribution of information about birth control methods. (An ironic footnote to the notion that China was inappropriately interfering in human rights.) Now, some saw in AIDS the hand of a vengeful god delivering his wrath against homosexuals and later, we came to understand, drug users sharing their needles. Soon, however, women were turning up with the disease.

The pill had rendered condoms more or less unnecessary. AIDS made condoms an imperative. Unwanted pregnancy was not the issue, but failure to use a condom could spell a sentence of death or a life shortened by a debilitating disease. While the medical community continues its efforts to find a vaccine and expensive drug cocktails keep most in the developed world alive, AIDS has begun to ravage many African nations. (In a feeble and transparent attempt to appear humanitarian, George Bush pretends concern here while standing by as one African nation after another falls prey to genocidal internecine political conflicts, the heritage of centuries of colonial rule. For the U.S. and the European powers who raped and plundered the sub-Sahara of its wealth and now essentially stand by, hands in their pockets, silent witnesses to the aftermath of their colonial adventures, this is a form of birth control they can live with.)

In Europe, the United States and others of the developed areas of the globe, Malthus has been disproved on a grand scale. If anything, the left critique of Malthus, namely that as a society develops there will be natural checks on the birth rate, is now seemingly vindicated. In Italy, where the bambinos were traditionally adored, middle class affluence has soured a society drugged on the delicacies of a consumer culture to the messiness and inconvenience of child rearing. Babies get in the way. Italy now has the lowest birth rate in Europe. In Russia, both the birth rate and life expectancy have gone down precipitously by modern standards, as alcoholism and depression take their toll in the wake of the failure of the soviet experiment. As developed nations try to digest changes in the role of women and a redefinition of family, ( a still evolving story), the imperative for cheap labor must be attended to, and thus immigration from the poorer nations must be tolerated.

While London, Paris and New York, now as much as Tokyo, indulge in $200 sashimi meals, almost eradicating blue fin tuna from the oceans, much of the world is still hungry, poor, and obviously procreating like crazy. In many quarters, this tendency of the poor to multiply is seen as a threat--Latinos and Chicanos in the U.S. or Palestinians in the Israeli occupied territories for example--but, over all, unchecked global capital now sees either growing markets or a seemingly endless supply of cheap labor. Thus, we now have the perfect confluence of reactionary forces--the moral whip of poverty and the economic whip of greed.

Some Americans can remember when "Made in Japan" was synonymous with cheap goods. We are already in the period when "Made in China" has gained status and is giving way to manufactures from such venues as India, Indonesia or the Dominican Republic. No, there will be no cry for population control. Scarce workers mean high wages and lower profits. Scarce populations mean smaller markets. Like all games of "chicken," however, this game carries with it the prospect of death or disaster--in this case, for the whole planet. Just as much as it was when Malthus cast his baleful eye on the global economies, the race is between limited resources and potentially unlimited appetites.

The truth is that we have now had enough time to see the future and to know that it doesn't work. The automobile is a blight on the planet. Even fuel efficient cars would continue to use up the lion's share of dozens of other limited resources in their production and pave over the landscape with roads. The U.S. is the most egregious example, particularly in its subsidizing fuel-guzzling automobiles while starving rail and other public mass transportation. Once seen as the answer to sprawl, the high rise building is either an unsafe environment in which to live and work or--even in its supposedly "green" manifestations, expensive and dehumanizing. All those miracles of food production are slowly killing us, making of our planet the setting of a dystopian novel. As the poor multiply, they tear down trees to make way for the plots they need to plant to sustain themselves, gradually denuding the planet of virgin forests and all of the varied life forms they are home to. For now, it is goodbye polar bears. Soon, unless the population of this planet is checked and even much reduced, it will be goodbye ladies and gentlemen. Greed will have done its work and the life form that came to fancy itself located on the Great Chain of Being just below God and his angels will give way to the flora and fauna we fancy ourselves so superior to.

Population Control II

As of right now, there are far more people alive than our planet can accomodate. Another two to three billion will spell a disaster far worse than what we have to fear from other global threats. Desert golf courses with man-made water hazards are emblems of how commerce over-rules common sense. There are more and more news stories chronicling the tendency to privatize water here in the U.S. and in other nations around the world. In effect, air is already privatized since, outside of rural areas where pollution is not as great a problem as it is in the inner cities, communities with fresh air tend to be those with the highest income levels. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg is attempting to initiate a so-called congestion tax which would set up barriers to all but the most affluent drivers thus preserving an enclave, what in Mexico is called a zona rosa for the richest New Yorkers. The borough of Manhattan, no less than the desert golf course, has come to be a locus of unimpeded over-development. No empty lot, former parking lot or block of older buildings is safe from being converted into a luxury apartment building. Little regard is given to aesthetic considerations although Bloomberg disingenuously presents himself as an advocate for "green" buildings. Rather than impose limits on building in Manhattan, the mayor chooses to keep all but his fellow upper class cohorts out.

Since the Reagan/Thatcher counter-revolution against socialism was initiated and then replaced by globalized capital, the tendency to privatization has proceeded apace on every continent. Since the idea that "a rising tide floats all boats," (one of the conceits that drives this school of economic development), became the catch-phrase for international capitalism, it has become clear that, like Orwell's insight that "some are more equal than others," some boats are far more sea-worthy than others. (Coincidentally in keeping with this metaphor was the Chinese notion that leaving a state-run industry for the vagaries of the private sector came to be referred to as "jumping into the ocean.") The Chinese quickly abandoned their grey and blue Mao jackets for Armani suits after Mao died. That is, some Chinese got to wear Italian tailoring. Far more typical of China than its ascendent upper class (though small as a percentage of China's enormous population, in effect, at an estimated 60 million, roughly the population of France) are the millions of young girls toiling in factories at pennies per hour. The vast majority of the Chinese still reside in rural areas and must pay for their children's schooling. Many of those young girls send their wages back to the farm so that a younger brother can buy books and pencils. One of the paradoxes of history: public schools in the West; private schools in the land that only a few decades ago had declared a cultural revolution.

Although almost never discussed in mainstream media, the abandonment of socialist ideals by countries like Russia and China is really no mystery. No doubt one factor was the trillions of dollars spent by the U.S. in its cold war effort--every imaginable form of spying, propaganda, sabotage and covert (at least to most Americans) activity was employed from the very inception of the Soviet Union. But there is, I believe, a far more important factor. Countries as vast and populous as Russia and China would need far more than fifty or seventy years to convert significant numbers of people to the socialist ideal. Even Marx acknowledged this when he saw the need for a "dictatorship of the proletariat." It is clear now that in countries that took the socialist path, there was always a significant percentage of the population--probably a majority-- just waiting it out until conditions returned where they could abandon the drudgery of collective efforts and resume the pursuit of wealth--or at least some of the tinsel (bling?) that capitalism dangles before the drooling masses. In China, Mao's body was still warm when the word was let out that "it is good to be rich," a notion that, historically, few Chinese ever doubted. In Russia, Mercedes-Benzes driven by Georgian mafiosi quickly began to clutter the streets of St. Petersburg (once Leningrad). A hallmark of the counter-revolution was to dissolve as rapidly as possible all (or as much as they could get away with) regulation of private enterprise. Despoilers of the planet are now far more free to do their mischief without looking over their shoulders at government regulators. And another key ingredient in the neo-conservative mix is the imposition of a taboo on any talk of population control. Global capitalism needs those bodies.

The Population Taboo

Last night on the BBC radio outlet, a discussion concerning world food supplies was broadcast. At no point in the discussion was overpopulation mentioned as key to the problem of providing enough food for the human population of the planet. As almost everyone is now aware, estimates are that within just a few more years our planet's population will spike once again, to something on the order of nine billion people. If there is a sense of crisis in the present scheme, it is merely the crisis of finding ways to feed that many people. The phrase "there are just too many people" has been rendered verboten, a taboo, just as the whole subject of population control has. Paul Erlich, who once warned of a population time bomb, has been ridiculed, even forced to recant for having gotten it all wrong. The use of nitrates, genetically altered foods, the greater ease of transporting food has allowed us to create enough people chow to feed millions more people. The environmental costs of applying such techniques is fretted over and filed away at the back of our collective minds. The wisdom of allowing a population of nine billion or more on our planet is rarely challenged. For, what, after all, could we do about it? Once they're here all these people need to be fed, don't they? What are you suggesting? That we allow millions to starve to death or die of disease or genocidal wars?

Examples of how we are destroying life on the planet through overpopulation and people sprawl range from the mundane (lawns and golf courses in Tucson, bears in suburban back yards, alligators in Florida swimming pools, etc.) to the far more alarming (global warming, deforestation, melting ice caps, over fishing the seas, etc.) There was a time when even the "left" ridiculed the notion that there could be too many people. Erlich was seen as a latter day Malthus, the man who infamously argued that population grows geometrically while resources grow arithmetically. Create a rational society, use the latest scientific methods, and mankind could feed everyone. Skeptics pointed to the tendency of advanced societies to have lower birth rates. As societies prospered and health care improved, it was no longer necessary or desirable for women to have multiple pregnancies. In other words, socialists and capitalists shared the notion that their way, their path to the future would render the ancient problem of balancing resources to population a thing of the past.

It should now be clear that both camps were wrong. Whether capitalist or communist, the man of the future simply will not be able to stuff his face with as much sashimi as he desires--not, at least, if he is joined at the table by nine or ten billion of his contemporaries. Of course, you could "farm" various fishes and therefore provide zillions more of the preferred species of the moment, but we now know that "farming" sea creatures has frightening hidden costs, as frightening in their way as the costs we currently pay for saturating the earth with nitrates and other chemicals to feed the various masses.

Why has the cry--once routinely heard--for population control died out? Why, particularly now, when the evidence of the environmental devastation that surging populations have caused is clearer than ever?

Lingering Icons of Empire

In retirement, one has more time to stare--stare at just about anything. And so, as I waited for my wife outside of a shoe store in Rockefeller Center, I looked up at a building I had known all my life, passed by many times, and never given much thought to. It was the door that caught my attention at first. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. Ultimately, I got the idea. What I was looking at was the "British Empire Building," constructed in 1932, the year the complex of buildings went up.

What most caught my attention was the series of bas-reliefs, awash in gold leaf, situated over the door and just below the crest of the Empire. Based on the nature of the art work, the building was devoted to trade and therefore immortalized--in personified form--the commodities that had helped to create the large fortunes for the empire. Depicted were salt, wheat, wool, coal, fish, cotton and tobacco--the essential products upon which a people's very survival depend.

Now, as I say, I have more time on my hands nowadays. Born in Brooklyn, I have spent over fifty years making excursions into "the city" and exploring its almost infinite wonders--from the glitter of Times Square to the quietude of the reading room at the Public Library. Every district--I could almost say every "block"-- of the city's many districts holds memories for me. They are memories associated with early adolescent excursions, (in the fifties, subway exploration was a safe enterprise for twelve year olds), going out on dates to the big movie houses or Broadway theaters, later, taking my own children in to explore the museums and cultural centers... A real list would be too long.

Each passage in life, however, gives one different "lenses" through which to view one's environment, and, of late, given our nation's tendency to empire, I am impressed by the icons of power that surround us. They have been with us for a long time, now. Many are overhead: the Con Edison beacon, the Chrysler Building's car ornament "griffins," the seemingly endless symbols of a not so secret Masonic "trust" that guides the economies of the Anglo-American Empire--from the murals in the Museum of Natural History to the golden pyramids (echos of our dollar note) that cap so many of the city's nineteenth and early twentieth century skyscrapers.

What jars me into another level of consciousness on this particular day is the special form that these personifcations of such basics as sugar, salt, fish and wool take on the art work atop the entry way to the British Empire Building. I am glad to have taken my camera with me so that I can capture these images and study them at my leisure. Often, I find, my initial reaction is one of shock or amusement. "How do they get away with this?" is a thought that has entered my mind more than once standing in a New York City street. Of course, we are fortunate that there has been no itinerant gang of political correctness police tearing down the politically incorrect art work that we have accumulated over the years, like some post-Soviet squad tearing down the glut of Lenin's statues. Whether we consider a given work art or artifact, the work often has value as history and should be preserved.

Yet, I suspect looking up at these particular doors that the only thing that has saved them is that they have become so part of the landscape that few pause to notice. It is a little bit like so-called white noise--it's there but it is "whited out" in the torrent of other sounds. It is tobacco and cotton that I here find most fascinating. How otherwise account for the fact that these racist images linger over our heads on New York's most prestigious shopping street? It is a bit a like the bare-breasted third world beauties that once (and to some extent still) populate the pages of the National Geographic. These girls are not just bare-breasted. This is not about that, that is, it is not just about art. They are slave girls. And then I think, am I being too sensitive here? Perhaps this door honors the women who once--in chains--harvested the cotton and tobacco of the Anglo-American empire.