Clean the Gulf, Clean House, Clean Their Clock
By FRANK RICH
Published: June 18, 2010
10.
HIGHLIGHT
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 20th, 2010
6:49 am
While circulating through a car dealership lot looking for something to replace my ten year-old Nissan, thoughts of the BP debacle inevitably came to mind. "We need that oil," we are constantly being told. How can anyone take seriously this administration's position, when, as far as I can tell, no one is addressing the fact that car lots are filled with cars that get about 17 miles to the gallon, not to speak of the vast number of gas guzzlers that get around environmental laws by calling themselves trucks? And, to make matters worse, auto manufacturers run ads touting power cars with over 400 horse power engines, just thumbing their noses at environmentalists. Fly into any European city and walk around the parking lots outside the terminals. There you will find beautifully designed European automobiles that almost universally get well over 30 miles to the gallon. We continue stubbornly in our perverse patterns of consumption, ("That's what the customers want!") only because the government, after 30 years of deregulation, has abandoned all responsibility. It's funny; when Ronald Reagan's "government is the problem" now seems a self-fulfilling problem--only it's not for too much governance, now it is for completely abdicating its responsibility to the commonweal.
Recommended Recommended by 819 Readers
293.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 22nd, 2010
10:43 am
For all but those whose ideology made it impossible, the election of a Black president was a deeply moving moment, and, for many who were so moved there was relief that the eight-year long nightmare was finally over. On the other hand, what seemed to be taking its place was a kind of restoration of values most akin to those associated with what the right likes to call the Northeastern Establishment. Obama resembled nothing so much as a Rockefeller Republican. By the end of the Bush administration, the usual caretakers had been selected for the Iraqi war commission, Rumsfeld was gone, Gates, a member of the commission, chosen to succeed him. There would be a "surge" in Iraq, and a de facto surge right here at home to get us through the closing days of a troubled and troubling administration. The men Obama chose to oversee the economic crisis were an early signal that the promised changes embedded in his campaign rhetoric would not, once realized, constitute a remarkable departure from what we were used to. The timidity with which the health care reforms were put forth and negotiated became yet another signal that, as a nation, we are still not ready to make meaningful changes. And the tragic irony in the Gulf spill's taking place just weeks after the young president appeared to be caving in to the big oil interests has been a serious blow. Those who had hoped for another FDR found that what we had actually gotten another Herbert Hoover.If the impression that Obama was the candidate of the best and the brightest in the establishment was an accurate one, the first months of his presidency have proven to be not only disappointing, but alarming. If this is the best establishment technocrats and tweakers can come up with, it is a certain sign that the American elite is now close to moribund, perhaps distracted and made dizzy with the wealth the last thirty years have allowed it to accumulate. If our society doesn't act soon to make substantive changes, the thousands of new multi-millionaires may find that even their newly accumulated wealth will not prove an adequate cushion against disaster. And Greek-style austerity programs are unlikely to fly here in the richest nation in the world.
Recommend Recommended by 4 Readers
34.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 4th, 2010
9:34 am
There will be not a few out there who will accuse you, Mr. Rich, of raining on an American parade. Hopefully, however, there will be others who will be moved by your courage in taking Independence Day as an opportunity to reflect on how far this nation needs to go before the words in its founding documents go beyond mere rhetoric and see their promise fulfilled in the lives of all American citizens. On a holiday marked by all variety of excessses and pious speeches, you remind us that it would serve us well, while celebrating, to pause, to reflect and to resolve to live up to our stated ideals.
Recommend Recommended by 21 Readers
198.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 5th, 2010
12:55 pm
"Carter’s prophecies were wrong: the grimmest speech any modern president has given was delivered just a few years before America kicked off a long era of impressive economic growth."
No, Carter was absolutely right. Thirty years of redistributing wealth to the top one percent of our society and allowing the commoners and the infrastructure of the country as well as its most crucial institutions to go to hell merely served to postpone the inevitable. You can only tweak the dials so much. Eventually, a new machine needs to be built.
Recommend Recommended by 7 Readers
658.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 7th, 2010
12:18 pm
If you are looking for evidence of the demise of the nine-to-five job with benefits and a pension plan, just roll your car out of the garage and get on the highways of our land. There is no longer a "rush hour." The roads are clogged with traffic from dawn til dusk. Where are all those people going? What are they scrambling for? In the "good old days," roads were clear by ten in the morning as American workers were employed in factories and offices until quitting time and the five o'clock rush hour. Now, in something akin to what the Chinese call "jumping in the ocean," millions of Americans are out there all day long in a frenzied stream of traffic that conjures up a scene from a dystopian novel. Most vehicles have single occupants and, although this phenomenon can be in part explained by the surge in the number of female drivers, most of the drivers are males, members of the sex that once dominated as "head of household," providers for the once classic family of four. Male or female, all those drivers out there are now "free" to search and to strive. After nearly a century of being seduced into gas-guzzling, air-conditioned, leather-upholstered mobile salons with sterophonic sound, many Americans have found their spiritual home behind their windshields, alone, unrestricted by the demands of workplaces no longer available to them. Their various quests will continue at least as long as there is still gas in the pumps.
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An Economy of Grinds
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 12, 2010
223.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 13th, 2010
2:28 pm
As usual, David, you are onto something here, but circumscribed by your fundamental loyalty to the system such as it has existed through most of your adult life, that is, the Reaganite counter-revolution against the reforms instituted by the Democrats when they were still our version of a Labour Party, you fail to see the full implications of your intuitions. I have just read a sentence that may help. Writing in the New York Review of Books about the recent elections in England, Jonathan Raban points out that, "In Britain, the top 20 percent of earners make seven times as much as the bottom 20 percent--a ratio exceeded only by Singapore, Portugal, and the US." All those folks you so admire for having saved the system over the last thirty years did so at the cost of so skewing the distribution of wealth in this country to the point where our spiritual brethren consists of quaint Asian kingdoms and medieval Iberian realms. The "princes" and dullards alike that you describe in your article are now so fat, so overwhelmed by the wealth they have been allowed to hoard that there is little motivation to employ their imaginations--or any other of their faculties--in an effort to change anything. Moreover, they have taken their children out of programs in math or science or medicine or anything socially useful and directed them to schools for investment banking. Why not, when the rewards have been so unbelievable?
Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader
Court Under Roberts Is Most Conservative in Decades
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: July 24, 2010
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
Aside from the times that Congressional committees treated Oliver North (who was allowed to appear in uniform no less) with kid gloves, the two most Kafkaesque Congressional hearings I have ever observed were the confirmation meetings for Justices Alito and Roberts. If the present court is a travesty, Democrats are as much to blame as Republicans. If a layman could tell, listening to what these two men had to say and what their history was like, that these two characters were only mouthing moderation and judicial temperance, House and Senate Democrats certainly should have been able to tell. Yet both men were approved with votes from Democrats. One of the definitions of fascism is corporate control of government. Let's hope only four and not five of these justices are blind to that distinction. Dangerously close.
Vincent Amato
New York City
August 7th, 2010
10:02 am
Dr. Krugman, I read your column today, share your outrage, and appreciate your being there to express what so many of us out here feel. Thank you for that. All that I have learned about the conservative mode of thought indicates that although on the one hand Republicans exist to protect and advance the cause of the wealthy and powerful, that is not their sole motivation. There is an essential mean-spiritedness that is not so simple but rather a complex broth made up partly of fear of the mob, partly of a dark view of human nature, (particularly human nature set free to follow its instincts and even whimsies, most of which are seen as dangerous), partly a demonology with medieval or even more ancient roots. Read the sermon in Moby Dick; read a lot of Melville, who understood the uniquely American form of this syndrome better than anyone. This same syndrome goes a long way to explain our lingering distaste for dark skinned peoples, for Indians, even, as D.H. Lawrence pointed out, for our own children. No purely economic critique can provide a comprehensive insight into what drives the men and women who daily agitate against governments spending money on schools and health and the trappings of a decent life since what drives their actions has much deeper roots than the banal desire for fiscal responsibility.Vincent Amato
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America Goes Dark
By PAUL KRUGMAN
It is a bit alarming to see that your piece, Dr. Krugman, (“America Goes Dark”), has elicited a little tea party in response. The right wing is driven to distraction by the one lingering vestige of a viable union movement--the government employees' unions. It is a piece of unfinished business (along with others you cite such as social security) that they could never marshal enough momentum to destroy during their almost uninterrupted string of \"victories\" in the thirty-year long counter-revolution against New Deal reforms. They find it maddening that there are still some workers who can retire and collect a pension. Rather than acknowledge that the number of workers who will ever see any pension at all let alone a designated benefit pension is at an historic low, they point a finger trembling with indignation at some mythical group of fat cats now sitting idly with their $200,000 to $800,000 dollar retirement checks. Ignored, too, is the reality of the \"tiers\" set up that even unions with pensions have been forced to negotiate, that give workers entering such work sectors only a fraction of the benefits that their fathers' generation once enjoyed. Rather than celebrate the essential de-unionization of the American work force initiated with Ronald Reagan's busting of the air traffic controllers' union and the gradual phasing out of benefits for the remnant of workers who are still unionized, the right--made apoplectic by the presence of a Democrat in the White House and the (now looking slim) prospect of future Democratic victories--sends out strident alarms reminiscent of a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers whenever it finds a 65 year-old retiree who still collects a pension. Little acknowledgement is made of the fact that some of those retirees had to work two or three jobs to maintain their families because the promise of the alleged pot of pension gold at the end of the rainbow was used as an arguing point for low wages while they were on the job.
The once proud UAW stood by while automobile plants relocated to the South where the word union is a dirty word. There are few industrial unions left like the old steel workers' union essentially because there are few industries left in this country. I believe it was the robber baron Jay Gould who once quipped that you could, under the right circumstances, get one half of the working class to kill the other half. Unfortunately, we are once again living through such circumstances. With taxes at historically low rates, in a nation with taxes lower than most other advanced nations and a distribution of wealth that ever widens the gap between rich and poor, it is a truly depressing prospect to see that for some benighted souls out there the bad guys are the pensioners.
Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents
By SCOTT SHANE, MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH
In a dozen countries — including in North Africa, Pakistan and former Soviet republics — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations.
153.
Vincent Amato
New York City
August 15th, 2010
10:17 am
These operations are only kept secret from the American people for the most part. Then, as has been thoroughly chronicled by Chalmers Johnson and others, when the inevitable "blowback" occurs, it is only the American people who are surprised. On the other hand, finding and destroying terrorist cells through covert operations, ideally with the cooperation of foreign governments in the lands where they reside is a far superior tactic to our policy of the last nine years, viz., to declare war on an entire people by declaring war on their governments. These are not wars in any case, but invasions and occupations for which the cost in dollars, the death of innocents and lost respect for the U.S. is clearly too high to justify. The key concept here seems to be transparency. If there really are bad guys out there, why not tell everyone, the American people included, that we are out there looking for them and determined to take them out? The thrust of our present policy in Iraq and Afghanistan invites the thought that our real agenda is imperial expansion.
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers
Deadliest for City’s Walkers: Male Drivers, Left Turns
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
A study of 7,000 crashes involving pedestrians in New York City offers new insight into the precarious life on the streets of America’s biggest city.
86.
Vincent Amato
New York City
August 16th, 2010
1:51 pm
Watch for the number of pedestrians involved in accidents to rise precipitously with the inauguration of the Mayor's disastrous reconfiguration of traffic lanes on many of the city's streets. These changes are a blemish on the city and a living monument to the petulance of an arrogant man who could not get his way on congestion pricing and thus has chosen to punish not just drivers but the populace as a whole. That the new floating parking lanes are ugly and absurd is one thing, but they also represent an extreme hazard. Car doors now open into bike lanes on one side and passing traffic on the other. Pedestrians crossing major avenues now drift into the middle of the street after navigating past first the bike lane and then the cars parked "floating" in the middle of the street. These changes have the mayor's fingerprints all over them; our nominal traffic commissioner is just that--a purely nominal figure. Bicycles, when they even bother to use the newly designated lanes, more often than not illegally ride in the opposite direction. A traffic officer told me that she did not have the right to ticket offenders on bicycles, that must be done by the (essentially absent on our streets) police. This last matter is a serious one. I have observed wholesale traffic violations by private automobiles as well as taxis and other commercial vehicles; I cannot recall seeing anyone stopped for a violation in the last ten years or more. What with bogus street fairs, the disingenuous conversion of Park Avenue into a pedestrian paradise, red bus lanes, just to cite one example, narrowing a major artery to the Lincoln tunnel to one lane, endless parades, newly constructed islands that accommodate a tiny number of people at the cost of further blocking the smooth flow of traffic for thousands, we are now presented with an uglier city that is even more polluted due to hundreds of cars idling as they wait to navigate through the city's streets. These changes have been made essentially by fiat without any real consultation with the citizens of New York City. One can only hope that after the imperious Bloomberg administration happily fades from power, wiser heads will get out the back hoes and the paint cans and make things right.
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Key Karzai Aide in Corruption Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A.
By DEXTER FILKINS and MARK MAZZETTI
An aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan being investigated for corruption is paid by the C.I.A., officials said, underscoring deep contradictions in American policy.
Share your thoughts.
276.
Vincent Amato
New York City
August 26th, 2010
2:29 pm
Ahh, the joys of empire! Where is our Kipling? Where is the bard who can aptly chronicle our glorious enterprise?
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Sarah’s Amazing Race
By GAIL COLLINS
As the worlds of Alaska and reality TV collide, maybe the next new program should be entitled “Shooting With the Stars.”
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
I don't see how John McCain can sleep nights looking back on his (or some nefarious advisor's) decision to choose to put \"one heartbeat from the oval office\" an individual who is--dare we say it--a complete idiot. That the people of Alaska chose her for their governor at one point is a source of wonder and dismay. The cold weather must have gotten to them or they were just bored and thought why not just go for a pretty face? Ms. Palin's current alliance with the Tea Party crowd is, of course, completely appropriate and in keeping with the general level of intelligence of the participants in that so-called movement.
Look, if the Great Depression forced us to live with Father Coughlin and a host of other tinhorn demagogues, why shouldn't we be forced to tolerate Palin and her crowd during the current economic crisis? No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of... Well, you know.
Unfortunately, there is a serious dimension to all this. I went to a local political debate right here in sophisticated New York City and the presence of Tea Pary neanderthals who behaved like thugs was, for me at least, more alarming than amusing. The danger is that these types, obviusly with prodding from forces behind the scenes, will become a permanent fixture of what passes for political discourse in this country. It is too early to equate these folks with brown shirts, but there are enough similarities in their approach and stubborn irrationality to give cause for concern. I frankly believe that a strong response to this phenomenon is long overdue. Our president seems insistent on always taking the high ground, always being cool or suave or unflappable. There are times, however, when a strong response is the only responsible one.
Oil Sheen Seen Near Damaged Platform in Gulf of Mexico
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JACK HEALY
The mile-long sheen was spotted hours after an explosion on the offshore oil platform on Thursday, the Coast Guard said.
Your Submitted Comment
Display Name
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
One of the hallmarks of failing (and flailing) empires is lack of attention to infrastructure and environmental impact. A visitor to the defunct Soviet Union in the first months of its demise could not help but notice that the \"worker's paradise\" had taken on all the trappings of rust belt decay. Not only was there an absence of state-of-the-art industry, not surprisingly, eye-burning pollution was everywhere. If squeezing resources and profits begins to eclipse all other considerations, it is only a matter of time--and not a lot of time at that--before the house of cards begins to teeter.
One would think that everyone involved it the off-shore drilling business would be particularly fastidious right now. The aspect of business as usual in this incident is amazing and troubling.
1938 in 2010
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The inadequacy of the Obama administration’s initial economic stimulus has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap.
361.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 6th, 2010
3:38 pm
The frightening conclusion your line of thought inevitably leads to, Dr. Krugman, is that the only way out of this crisis is war. It is hard to imagine just how bad things would have to get in this country before there was an actual consensus on allowing government to put in place rational economic measures. Why, what would happen if those measures proved to be successful? Such an outcome might call into question the most deeply held article of faith in the American theology namely, that our chance (slim as it may be) to "score" as individuals outweighs and transcends anything so boring as the common good.And as for WWII inaugurating a period of prosperity, my memory of how things went is that war-time "prosperity" ended when the war ended. From 1945 until 1950, this country pretty much felt like it was still in a depression. It took yet another war to really get us rolling. It only came with the onset of the Korean War and the apparent determination of this country's leaders that putting the country on a permanent war footing was the only way to ensure domestic prosperity. By 1960, when Ike left the White House warning us of a military-industrial complex, it was clear that a path had been set and that that path would be extremely difficult to change.
Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers
As Stadiums Vanish, Their Debt Lives On
By KEN BELSON
Taxpayers in New Jersey and in other areas of the country are still paying for facilities abandoned by the teams they were built for.
146.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 8th, 2010
10:51 am
Before any agreement to give private enterprises tax breaks, the parties should be obligated to open their books to the public. This includes the various "authorities" that collect fares and tolls from the public. Particularly during times such as these (unfortunately not that rare)when state governments are so strapped for cash that schools, libraries and other essential services are the first items to be cut, the need to make available a complete cost-benefit analysis and a referendum on these deals prior to their being adopted seems obvious.
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Obama Is Against a Compromise on Bush Tax Cuts
By JACKIE CALMES
The president’s decision not to extend tax cuts for the rich adds a populist twist to an economic package designed to entice support from big businesses and their Republican allies.
572.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 8th, 2010
10:40 am
Cries of incipient socialism, tea party demagoguery, warnings that the sky is falling (or will soon) all fall within the same tired scenario we are treated to each time the rich are threatened with losing their preferred tax status. The Republican Party (and now, sadly, a large segment of the Democratic Party) is little more than a protection agency for those who wish to be shielded from what true patriots might define as their fair share of the burdens of maintaining a modern nation. Even they must be aware of the need for a fair tax structure, but the machinery of party politics seems to dictate that preferential treatment be maintained for as long as possible. This is not a tier within our society that gives up ANYTHING without a fight. The elitist notion, sometimes even clothed (or veiled)in a semi-theological belief that, when sacrifices need to be made, we need to keep in mind that it is only the rich who know how to spend responsibly should be addressed directly by the president. At this point, he would have nothing to lose by putting the cards on the table.
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Court Dismisses a Case Asserting Torture by C.I.A.
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
A sharply divided appeals court dismissed a lawsuit involving the C.I.A.’s “extraordinary rendition” program.
113.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 9th, 2010
11:49 am
I keep going back to those pictures of London during the Blitz. Night after night of aerial bombardment courtesy of the twentieth century's most demonic contribution to Western culture, attacks from the air on civilian centers. It seems to have taken just one day of such attacks on what we newly labeled the homeland to rend the fabric of American justice. A tradition that went back to 1215 A.D. thrown in the rubbish heap. In England, at least, there are those who will not let their former Prime Minister go to a book signing without reminding him of his war crimes. Here, a President who opposed the war from the start and won election by promising to extricate the nation from the debacle politely, delicately, disingenously praises the architect of the war for his essential patriotism. We are reaping the whirlwind of a policy of "looking ahead" rather than bringing to justice a cabal that found no contradiction between lies, torture chambers and respect both for international law and our own constitution. Our "exceptional" empire has come to be defined solely by its 14 trillion dollar GDP rather than by an exemplary commitment to justice and human rights. The prospect of a right wing Supreme Court saving the day and overturning the finding of this appeals court seems sadly unlikely.
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers
China, Japan, America
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Japan knows that its economy is hurt when China buys up its bonds. It’s the same for our economy, but our policy makers just don’t get it.
34.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 13th, 2010
9:53 am
With all due respect, Dr. Krugman, "Stay tuned"! Stay tuned for what? Those businesses you refer to as joint ventures are some of the biggest contributors to campaign chests. This is the much vaunted free trade, flat earth, globalized new economy we have heard so much about. Your concern for both American and Chinese workers is touching, and anyone with a sense of social justice will of course agree, but take the time to read some of the responses to your column today and you will see that the right wing would much rather focus on the alleged shortcomings of the president than do anything to inhibit the absolute freedom of the most rapacious businesses to take advantage of any loopholes or lapses in our laws that enables them to maximize profits. They care little that the Chinese are seen as the bad guys in all this--which of course they are, but not without the complicity you correctly point out of a number of American businesses.There is another thread that emerges from some of the comments, namely, that many Americans still suffer the illusion that China is a communist or socialist country rather than the monument to state capitalism that it has become. Chinese kids have to buy their own text books. Nothing is free anymore and there are hundreds of worker protests against low wages and unhealthy working conditions. Of course, Americans have as a rule never lost much sleep over the working conditions of overseas workers; they care little even for the working conditions of American workers. As the deregulated American workplace has become ever more hazardous for both citizens and millions of undocumented workers here in the U.S., it is unlikely that we will witness a huge groundswell of sympathy for exploited Chinese who have left farms all over China in search of jobs. Ironically, the economic well-being of the international work force now seems to be in the hands of Chinese workers struggling for better conditions. When they get decent working conditions, all that cheap stuff Americans have become so addicted to will rise in price and yet another party will be over. China threatens to become a nation ripe for another revolution. Could take a while, though. Maybe we should dust off our old copies of Marx and Trotsky to get some real clue about what the future promises.
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Power to the (Blogging) People
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
A robust blogosphere, with populist and nationalist leanings, is becoming the defacto voice of the people in China.
9.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 15th, 2010
10:27 am
The most important thing to keep in mind about China is, as you put it, its "shucking off communism." The shucking, in terms of its economic reality, is essentially complete. Chinese citizens are now completely on their own in a newly privatized economy. Mao's picture still hangs over the large entry gate to the forbidden city, but Mao's ideology has long been discarded. It took a New York minute for the Chinese to throw over what came to be called the "gang of four" and put the entrepreneurial machine in full throttle. The ruling elite in China keeps its purely titular relationship to communism out of obvious concern over keeping peace with its potentially still quite volatile masses. What we are now dealing with in China is a powerful nationalist entity. In retrospect, what Mao's real accomplishment(no small order) was to make China Chinese. If we ever get in a conflict over the lingering issue of Taiwan, it will not be out of the ruling group's desire to bring socialism to the island, but rather motivated by the usual nineteenth century concerns of large empires to hold on and to gain ever more real estate.It may serve the purposes of neo-cons here in the U.S. to allow to linger a mistaken equation between state capitalism and communism in the name of further besmirching that evil philosophy, but for purposes of analysis and understanding it is an equation that obfuscates far more than it elucidates.
Recommend Recommended by 6 Readers
Poll Suggests Opportunities for Both Parties in Midterms
By JEFF ZELENY and MEGAN THEE-BRENAN
The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found widespread dissatisfaction with President Obama and voters’ own members of Congress.
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Vincent Amato
New York City
September 16th, 2010
9:55 am
While, on the one hand, there seems to exist a strong adversarial relationship between the two parties that alternately govern this country, belying the criticism of those who use such terms as Republicrats to describe the flavor of actual governance, it does seem true that most of the adverse behavior comes from just one of the parties. Republicans criticize Democrats strenuously, viscerally sounding alarums--creeping socialism, Europeanization, the destruction of our quaint, uniquely unique exceptionalism--via incantations that are delivered in the colorful local dialects of the regions of the country from which most of this crowd has traveled to Washington. Democrats, for the most part, seem to have chosen to take the high or high-minded ground, not responding in kind. They leave television wags to deal with the inanity of a Sarah Palin, preferring to behave as gentlemen--in spite of John McCain's having played Russian roulette with the country's fate by placing the woman a heartbeat from ruling the most powerful country in the world. They then watch this same individual who they chivalrously avoided criticizing too strenuously, go on to become the spiritual center of something called the Tea Party movement, a group whose behavior conjures up Italian brown shirts more than it does colonial tax protesters in powdered wigs. And, in an almost cosmic display of political chivalry, Democrats basically pass on the opportunity to make even polite observations about the fact that the thirty-year-long regimen of Reaganite policies consumated in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Instead, they allow Republicans to get away with laying blame for the crisis entirely at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and, incidentally, the Democrat currently running for governor here in New York.If, as the Tea folks argue, the American people are angry over the lack of progress being made to end unemployment and get the wheels of industry and commerce going again, Democrats seem to consistently fail to make the observation that the way to make this happen is not via more Republican congressmen, but more Democrats, enough let's say to overcome the present need for super majorities on every significant Senate vote so that policies can be put in place that this newspaper's nobel laureate argues almost daily are the sine qua non for positive change. Such a message must come from the president first of all, but if Democrats were serious about turning around this country's economy, why they should all be out there making stump speeches, speeches that are loud, clear--and frequent.
Recommended Recommended by 2 Readers
Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries
By DAVID STREITFELD
Library Systems & Services was hired to run the libraries of Santa Clarita, Calif., setting off an outsourcing debate.
Display Name
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
If, as a nation, we believe it is acceptable for companies to make a profit providing health care, basic utilities, schooling, soldiers in arms, why not libraries as well? That those profits are taken out of the hides of ordinary working men and women seems of little concern in a land that has come to resemble the hugest casino that ever existed.
Trifecta of Torment
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Republicans are offering a triple whammy to fix the economy: fewer jobs, worse deficits and greater inequality.
159.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
Vincent Amato
New York City
October 7th, 2010
3:20 pm
The enemy of the working class in this country is not the Republican Party or its satellite fringe groups such as the Tea Party crowd. We all know where they stand and whose interests they represent. Unless one subscribes to the notion that there really is only one party and that most Democrats fear creeping socialism or Europeanization as much as their cohorts across the aisle, (in which case, there really is no prospect for change), what we are witnessing is a failure of nerve on the part of the current administration in Washington. The apparent inability or unwillingness to clearly spell out why hand-wringing over deficits and public debt is misplaced during periods of high unemployment and wholesale redistribution of wealth rolls out a red carpet for Republicans such as the current governor of New Jersey whose policy of cuts in social services and recent veto of a large public works program that would have created jobs is allowed to pass as enlightened governance. This paper's Nobel laureate has spelled out--almost daily and in no uncertain terms--why such policies are precisely the wrong policies if we are to turn our economy around. Several of the comments today illustrate that the school of thought that says "let the Republicans win, and after they go down in flames we can pick up the pieces and start again," (always born out of frustration), is being heard again. It was a similar frustration with the policies of the Clinton administration that led to the defeat of the Gore candidacy and gave us eight years of a truly reactionary Bush administration. As the Obama regime currently illustrates, once that happens, it is not so easy to dig ourselves out of the hole Republicans frenziedly dig deeper and deeper. Democrats must take head on the true nature of post-modern Republican policy. Once associated with fiscal conservatism, Republicans learned that the most effective way to destroy social programs is by allowing deficits of such huge dimensions that there is nothing left in the public coffers to fund them. Just as the Kerner Commission warned in 1968 of a future U.S. consisting of two societies--one black, one white--the prevailing tendencies to regressive taxation, regressive entitlements, privatization and debt phobia will create a society of haves and have-nots that will resemble nothing so much as Europe under feudalism.
Recommend Recommended by 95 Readers
Thursday, March 24, 2011
My New York Times Journal
I am going to try to post on this blog site a record of my posts to the New York Times. Most of this writing was done in the heat of the moment and thus is replete with errors of all kinds. The writing was done in full awareness of the fact that there must be a better way to spend one's time, but it will serve, if nothing else, as a chronicle of a certain period in my life. At the end of many of these pieces, one will find a notation as to recommendations by other readers. The number of "recs" often merely reflects the point in the day at which I pasted the piece into my journal. On some occasions, the Times chose not to print my piece at all. Where one does not find recommendations or a number attached to the piece that is why. Now, in chronological order, are the posts:
107.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 16th, 2010
11:51 pm
The post-New Deal era inaugurated during the Reagan era has many frightening parallels to the post-Reconstruction era following the Civil War. "Big government" is merely a euphemism for any government at all. Such junctures in U.S. history test the very constitutional framework under which we are supposed to live. When, for example, the least democratic branch of our government, the U.S. senate, which gives enormous, one might say, undue power to states with small, perforce conservative populations, is further skewed by an insistence on 60-vote super majorities, the will of the people is in danger of being held hostage by a small minority. The senate's role in the selection of Supreme Court justices further skews its negative impact as has been made clear in recent decisions such as, for example, the decisions on campaign finance reform and a redefinition of eminent domain to extend to private development. We have witnessed many microcosms of Fort Sumter over the last thirty years, and the nation has been held hostage largely because of political timidity in confronting so volatile a policy by the forces of the South and its allies in the less populous western states. Efforts to combat so-called political partisanship are rendered disingenuous by failing to label the growing regional and ideological divide in this nation.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader
228.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 22nd, 2010
8:38 am
While Newt Gingrich's comments are as shocking as they are revelatory of the true cast of much latter-day Republican thinking, (What would Honest Abe think of Newt?), they are entirely in keeping with the substance and tenor of the remarks made by Republicans on the House floor in the closing minutes of debate on the health bill. Minority Whip John Boehner was apoplectic in the face of immanent defeat. Republican rhetoric went far beyond the obvious demagoguery inherent in the argument that the House was not being truly representative since a majority of the American people did not support the bill. (A reference no doubt to polls which include enough respondents who felt the bill did not go far enough to give opponents of the bill a technical majority.) Although he did not pull his carefully coifed hair to emphasize his remarks, Boehner's red-faced cries of socialism and Europeanization were delivered in a manner that hearkened back to the Civil War era when fist fights were common on the House floor. While the bill was called Un-American and vows were made to challenge its constitutionality, Democrats wisely took the high ground and did not respond in kind, choosing rather to point out the bills merits. Nevertheless, contemporary Republican Party rhetoric is deeply troubling--whether it is cast in the mold of barely re-clothed Dixiecrats or the cooler pronouncements of the Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand crowd who seem unbowed by the poverty of their philosophy revealed in the world financial crisis. At some point, the Tea Party types, the thugs who showed up at town meetings on health care and the fanatic fringe of the anti-abortion crowd will need to be confronted more directly. Should their tactics and brand of political "debate" be allowed to go unchallenged, the "comity" that John Boehner pretends to hold as an ideal will be rendered completely impossible.
Recommend Recommended by 11 Readers
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 23rd, 2010
7:30 am
One has to wonder what it will take to check the growing use of near-Brown shirt tactics that are being utilized by the right wing in this country. All Americans should have been tuned in to C-Span’s coverage of the House debate leading up to the vote on health care reform. Unfortunately, I somehow doubt that many were. Had they done so, they would have been treated to the full range of demagoguery in the Republican Party’s arsenal of weapons. Although there was an occasional parliamentary slap of the wrist from the Chair in response to some of the most egregious behavior, Democrats essentially chose to take the high ground, reining in emotion and not responding in kind. This, in spite of the fact that on the right side of the aisle the histrionics came to elicit the pre-Civil War political cartoons of our high school textbooks in which we saw our esteemed representatives depicted brawling, shaking their canes at opponents and taking an occasional punch.Republican rhetoric was not always delivered in hysterical tones. The American political landscape is not so neatly divided by region as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. So while the neatly coifed Southerners resorted to red-faced ranting, finger pointing and prophesies of doom, Republican Northerners, the University of Chicago types, acolytes of Milton Friedman et al., registered their philosophical opposition to any and all checks on the right to make a profit—even at the expense of public health—in more measured, pseudo-academic tones.What was puzzling was an absence of any substantial response from Democrats to either tactic. Was the Democrats’ subdued behavior merely the by-product of knowing they were on the verge of carrying the day? The one recent departure from Democratic restraint was President Obama’s courageous criticism of the sacrosanct Supreme Court’s decision to allow an unchecked flow of corporate funds into mostly Republican coffers. Such distinct criticism was not only uncharacteristic of the man who currently occupies the White House, it has become uncharacteristic of the Party as a whole. Though rare, it was enough to elicit head-shaking disbelief from our esteemed Chief Justice who seemed to smart personally from the remark.Democrats may feel that they need to tamp down the toxic rhetoric and tactics that characterize partisan politics, but there are times when it is dangerous and irresponsible to remain silent.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 26th, 2010
8:31 am
It took thirty years--almost to the day--for the true character of the men and women who spearheaded the assault on American values initiated in the Reagan era to luridly reveal itself. The greatest danger is to basically agree with the demagogues and thugs, cave in to cynicism and conclude, after all, that the encyclopedic array of sociopathology we are now being exposed to is the "real" America. Instead, it is a dark stratum in American life that has always been with us, the America of vigilante-ism and organizations like the Klan. Barely reconstituted Dixiecrats and the spiritual descendents of Joe McCarthy could pretend to be within the mainstream of American political life while they were having their way, digging us into so deep an economic and social hole that their much despised New Deal liberalism could never again be resurrected, but the election of a Black president, the collapse of the financial house of cards they constructed, the mere impulse to bring about reforms that would place us within the family of civilized nations, have all served to put them over the edge. They are desperate, and, it would be profoundly dangerous to ignore them.
53.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 2nd, 2010
1:03 pm
The list grows--not only of unelected representatives--in this case the unchosen selecting the next unchosen--but of men and women who, by a standard that once prevailed, are barely qualified for public office. New York State may be an egregious example of the phenomenon, but it is certainly not the only case. It is perhaps no mystery that the "best and the brightest" now shy away from elective office, but if the downward trend continues, the crumbling at the foundations of our struggling democracy will be in ever deeper trouble.
Recommend Recommended by 6 Readers
82.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 9th, 2010
7:11 am
Let's see now, what would cause prices to go down in this country? Most Americans are so far removed from what the Great Depression was like that they can't see much harm in prices going down. Nor do they really understand the mechanism by which such a phenomenon could occur. Most Americans worry a great deal about inflation, some even conjuring up images of Weimar Germans rolling wheelbarrows full of Marks to buy a loaf of bread. Most Americans are blind to the "benefits" that inflation can bring. Most Americans wish they could buy lots of gold as a hedge against inflation. (For instruction, many of us might consider the impact on our net wealth of the decline in the value of our homes--a rather obvious instance of deflation.) Yet, unemployment stubbornly lingers, and rather than putting more Americans to work, strapped state governments lay off teachers and other workers, thus further diminishing the aggregate number of robust consumers. Declining sales taxes are one indication that consumers are tightening their belts, and, for a change, saving some cash rather than spending it. In supply and demand terms, even taking into consideration periodic upturns because of inventory depletion of certain goods, the net effect is downward pressure on prices. Lower prices mean less profits, less taxes collected, more businesses closing down, and the dread downward spiral of a market economy dependent on the citizenry spending with relative abandon becomes a frightening reality. In fact, apart from an almost eerily robust stock market that sits on the edge of its seat waiting for a bump from some technological innovation like the i-pad, most of the signs in the real world indicate that the V-shaped recovery we are all waiting for may not occur for a long time. In fact, if the warnings of Paul Krugman and other like-minded economists go unheeded, a deeper V may be lurking in the near future.
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers
582.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 16th, 2010
12:50 pm
This, on the same day that Paul Krugman insists that--in spite of everything--we need to bail out big banks. What Paul Krugman doesn't understand is that it is precisely such calls that fuel another fire, the so-called Tea Party rebellion. When banks that are "too big to fail" are threatened with failure, the only immediate response of government should be to nationalize them and then dispose of their assets as makes the most sense for the majority of tax payers rather than the same arrogant manipulators that got us where we are in the first place. Krugman and politicians of like mind may heave big sighs of exasperation at the lowly layman's lack of sophistication, but the lowly layman isn't stupid. We lowly laymen out here are just waiting fo the other shoe to drop. A jobless recovery that is celebrated only on Wall Street doesn't begin to address the need for deep reform.
Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers
33.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 24th, 2010
3:07 pm
Laying teachers off based on some measure of performance rather than seniority is a very bad idea. There are obviously forces that find the teachers' union too powerful and find the notion of teacher tenure outdated. We see echoes of this in last week's news about "rubber rooms" and Florida's toying with doing away with tenure. From the point of view of the UFT, all tenured teachers are equal and are to be treated equally. That core concept grows out of the fact that, in order to win tenure, a prospective teacher must have the appropriate university training, the appropriate courses in education, pass a licensing exam, and, perhaps most crucially, survive a three-year long probationary period. The forces that want to do away with tenure in effect want to find a way to buy good teaching on the cheap, and there is really no way to do that. Any serious program of improving the quality of teachers and guarding against keeping individuals in our classrooms who would be better off pursuing some other vocation must aim at investing in the crucial stages of the process leading up to tenure. More needs to be spent on teacher education, licensing exams must test for the appropriate skills, and the probationary period must have not just real rigor, but real and intensive support for the teacher-in-training. There are far too many variables completely outside of the control of the individual classroom teacher to make anything approaching a fair evaluation of merit and far too many opportunities for administrators or school districts with their own agendas to treat teachers unfairly. Tenure is a right and an honor that needs to be maintained within the profession.
Recommend Recommended by 32 Readers
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 26th, 2010
6:34 pm
First, a \"super minority\" blocks legislation and debate that a clear majority of the American people favor; they then go on to argue disingenuously, illogically, that they are the true representatives of the people. What makes this spectacle even more frustrating and alarming is that they further argue that since the Democratic majority is out of touch with popular sentiment, more Republicans need to be elected in the November elections. What this pattern clearly calls for is a rededication of the Democratic Party leadership which seems strangely stoic in the face of this strategy. The party should be enforcing discipline among so-called Blue Dogs and putting out the call to voters that what the last year has proven is that President Obama's vision can only be realized by increasing Democratic margins. If the president and the party have been ineffectual, it is because they have been forced to decide between compromise and getting nothing at all done. It would only take a few more House and Senate Democrats elected to Congress to finally address the many urgent needs that thirty years of good government under siege has wrought.
Vincent Amato
New York City
May 12th, 2010
11:38 am
From Pete Peterson on down, the writing is on the wall, viz., \"austerity\" programs for the working classes, the destruction of all unions, the end of all pension programs, the further privatization of functions long seen as falling within the province of governments. The outrage that is expressed wholesale in the media toward the alleged greed of public sector employees and the unions which represent them is far more intense than anything expressed toward the one percent of the population in this country and others which has sequestered the lion's share of the common wealth. And yet, in the midst of this firestorm of propaganda, I find myself focusing on some of the small things, like the fact exposed in the film \"Food, Inc.\" that where once the FDA here in the U.S. had 5,000 inspectors, it now has 700, and we are in danger of being poisoned by the meat and poultry we consume. There are seemingly infinite examples of how deregulation and unfettered business practices endanger us and the planet we live on. The fractal array of these factoids add up to a system which is in grave crisis. Since we seem no longer to fear a threat from socialistic thinking, one has to wonder why reason should not prevail. A world-wide regimen of progressive taxation seems a good place to start.
16.
Vincent Amato
New York City
May 18th, 2010
10:11 am
Last week one of the PBS television stations played a documentary about John Lindsay's career as mayor. The program served as a chilling reminder of the turmoil that was taking place during that period. I was a twenty-three year-old teacher in a Bedford-Stuyvesant junior high school when Lindsay first took office in 1966. Like many of my generation, I was felt myself both a witness to and a participant in the historic events taking place during that period. As is your usual wont, you take a spin on history that does not fit the reality, but instead subtly implies that it is the--what shall we call it--restoration? counter-revolution? that we have lived with since the inception of the Reagan administration has vastly improved our lives. Yes, calm has been restored. Beyond mere calm, what we seem presently to have is a catatonic state. Few Americans, perhaps particularly few New Yorkers would choose to return to a period marked by assassinations, urban insurrections, high crime rates, three-month long school strikes and urban decay. Yet, in the midst of all of that turmoil, there was hope for a better future. Instead, our society (and that includes all of us) settled. Out of frustration and weariness, we replaced that hope with ceaseless nesting, the quest for a comfort zone based on acquiring things. Money rules. The poor are still with us, our society is more racially segregated here in the North than the old South once was, and we drug ourselves, when it isn't with actual phramaceuticals, with the endless entertainments and distractions from a reality we once dreamed would be very different.
Recommend Recommended by 30 Readers
59.
Vincent Amato
New York City
May 20th, 2010
1:04 pm
The current wisdom that Paul Ehrlich's prediction of a devastating population explosion was wrong (merely because the application of ammonium nitrate to our soils allowed us to feed teeming billions) is one of the great lies of the period we live in. As has been documented from just about every perspective of late, our planet simply cannot sustain current populations let alone rationally prepare for another three billion or so. Moreover, in the literature of the NPOs and NGOs, it has become at best politically incorrect, even taboo, to call for population control measures. The only real check on rising birth rates is a rising standard of living; thus the problem aggregates in the poorest countries and calls for birth control even have to bear the disingenuous onus of racism. In the 1960s, what gets summarized in the narrative as "the pill" frightened conservatives because it attacked a core tenet of their belief systems, namely, that human beings could have some control over their own lives. So long as we delay addressing this problem, we live with the constant threat of over-fishing, over-farming, over-deforestation on the one hand, and worst of all, a deep decline in the quality of life for all the planet's inhabitants. As usual, what keeps us from acknowledging and attempting to reverse the current global population trend are the billions of dollars that the trend puts into the coffers of just a few of us Earthlings.
Recommended Recommended by 1 Reader
45.
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 1st, 2010
9:51 am
It is we, the American people, who must ultimately bear responsibility for each ratcheting up of state terror as the Israeli modus operandi. It is the de facto silence of U.S. policy makers--where it is not our suspected outright sponsorship or encouragement--that gives extremists in Israel carte blanche to carry out such operations. Israel almost casually ignores all international law, receives the opprobrium of the nations of the world, and gets support from the U.S. alone. The sparks fly ever closer to the Middle East powder keg, and when the blowback inevitably occurs, we will, just as inevitably, blame the victims.
Recommend Recommended by 60 Readers
135.
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 4th, 2010
1:06 pm
Just to take the long view for a moment in order to respond to yet another conservative riff on the superiority of profit-driven private enterprise over government programs. Looking back, it appears that one of the worst coincidences in modern history was the election in both England and America of conservative leaders at the very time that the old Soviet Union was falling apart. The way we and the English tell the story, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher brought down the communist regimes almost single-handedly. While both leaders were elected out of desperation by respective electorates driven by exhaustion and fear at the end of the 1970s, and "saved" their nations by attacks on the working class and redistributing wealth to the richest of their citizens, initiating a series of unsustainable bubbles to do so, the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself, giving up the faith with only a random shot or two being fired. Conservatives chose to celebrate the occasion as an almost divinely inspired sign of the superiority of Western laissez-faire policies. Yet, in the years since 1989, the West, now free from the threat or interference of an opposing economic ideology, has used its newfound freedom to limp from one crisis to another. Faced with one embarrassing economic debacle after another, and with no evil empire to blame, conservatives employ the only tactic available to them, namely, to turn their verbal assaults on such dread domestic enemies as teachers' unions whom they portray as remnants of now moribund socialistic institutions. Not even the 2008 financial collapse or the mischief of an oil giant like BP can shake their faith in the superiority of unregulated, unchecked profiteering, since, after all, there really is no alternative. "Look what happened to the Soviet Union," they mutter sotto voce. And they profess to be subtle in their thinking.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
While the New York Times and other U.S. media may rush to bury the story of Israel's massacre on the high seas, there are millions around the world who cannot shake their outrage at this incident. While yours, Mr. Cohen, is a thoughtful piece, it does not begin to deal with the scale of the crime committed and therefore seems more than a bit detached from reality. Israeli behavior gives new, darkly grim meaning to the term overkill, sometimes referred to as its asymmetrical responses to perceived threats. Israel presently behaves like the murderer who doesn't hesitate to murder again since one can only be executed for the crime once. Policies born of such thinking can only grow more and more deeply immoral. The fact that this kind of arrogant bullying only takes place because the state of Israel feels immune to sanctions from its greatest benefactor may contain the seeds of its own downfall. More and more Americans want to distance themselves from such behavior, more and more Americans are reflecting on the fact that it is their tax dollars that are contributing to this nightmare.
3
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 18th, 2010
12:53 am
Although difficult to assert without seeming to have some political axe to grind, I would argue, Dr. Krugman, that what we are seeing is the beginning of the demise of capitalism as we have known it. Just as soviet-style socialism seemed an abysmal failure and eventually imploded, capitalism simply can no longer function as it once did. Why this is so is an interesting question. What is fairly clear is that all of the tweaking of the dials that has taken place since the end of the brief period of rising standards of living at least in the advanced nations after the end of WWII are no longer effective. Going off the gold standard, the intentional destruction of the union movement, the demise of rational funding for all variety of social welfare funding, the give away to the rich (in the perhaps disingenous hope of a trickle down effect, outsourcing of manufacturing to nations where wages were (repeat, were) a mere fraction of what workers once could commnand in the advanced nations--none of these has had much of an effective life span. I do not believe that anything sinister is going on here. The liberal democracies have just run out of any solution they can imagine allowing to be put in place. This is now a global crisis that, to power an unpleasant word from another venue, will undoubtedly require major restructuring. It appears we will have to wait until things get worse, much worse, unfortunately, until we see whether the traditional capitalists will go down as the soviets did, that is, without a shot being fired.
Recommend Recommended by 135 Readers
107.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 16th, 2010
11:51 pm
The post-New Deal era inaugurated during the Reagan era has many frightening parallels to the post-Reconstruction era following the Civil War. "Big government" is merely a euphemism for any government at all. Such junctures in U.S. history test the very constitutional framework under which we are supposed to live. When, for example, the least democratic branch of our government, the U.S. senate, which gives enormous, one might say, undue power to states with small, perforce conservative populations, is further skewed by an insistence on 60-vote super majorities, the will of the people is in danger of being held hostage by a small minority. The senate's role in the selection of Supreme Court justices further skews its negative impact as has been made clear in recent decisions such as, for example, the decisions on campaign finance reform and a redefinition of eminent domain to extend to private development. We have witnessed many microcosms of Fort Sumter over the last thirty years, and the nation has been held hostage largely because of political timidity in confronting so volatile a policy by the forces of the South and its allies in the less populous western states. Efforts to combat so-called political partisanship are rendered disingenuous by failing to label the growing regional and ideological divide in this nation.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader
228.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 22nd, 2010
8:38 am
While Newt Gingrich's comments are as shocking as they are revelatory of the true cast of much latter-day Republican thinking, (What would Honest Abe think of Newt?), they are entirely in keeping with the substance and tenor of the remarks made by Republicans on the House floor in the closing minutes of debate on the health bill. Minority Whip John Boehner was apoplectic in the face of immanent defeat. Republican rhetoric went far beyond the obvious demagoguery inherent in the argument that the House was not being truly representative since a majority of the American people did not support the bill. (A reference no doubt to polls which include enough respondents who felt the bill did not go far enough to give opponents of the bill a technical majority.) Although he did not pull his carefully coifed hair to emphasize his remarks, Boehner's red-faced cries of socialism and Europeanization were delivered in a manner that hearkened back to the Civil War era when fist fights were common on the House floor. While the bill was called Un-American and vows were made to challenge its constitutionality, Democrats wisely took the high ground and did not respond in kind, choosing rather to point out the bills merits. Nevertheless, contemporary Republican Party rhetoric is deeply troubling--whether it is cast in the mold of barely re-clothed Dixiecrats or the cooler pronouncements of the Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand crowd who seem unbowed by the poverty of their philosophy revealed in the world financial crisis. At some point, the Tea Party types, the thugs who showed up at town meetings on health care and the fanatic fringe of the anti-abortion crowd will need to be confronted more directly. Should their tactics and brand of political "debate" be allowed to go unchallenged, the "comity" that John Boehner pretends to hold as an ideal will be rendered completely impossible.
Recommend Recommended by 11 Readers
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 23rd, 2010
7:30 am
One has to wonder what it will take to check the growing use of near-Brown shirt tactics that are being utilized by the right wing in this country. All Americans should have been tuned in to C-Span’s coverage of the House debate leading up to the vote on health care reform. Unfortunately, I somehow doubt that many were. Had they done so, they would have been treated to the full range of demagoguery in the Republican Party’s arsenal of weapons. Although there was an occasional parliamentary slap of the wrist from the Chair in response to some of the most egregious behavior, Democrats essentially chose to take the high ground, reining in emotion and not responding in kind. This, in spite of the fact that on the right side of the aisle the histrionics came to elicit the pre-Civil War political cartoons of our high school textbooks in which we saw our esteemed representatives depicted brawling, shaking their canes at opponents and taking an occasional punch.Republican rhetoric was not always delivered in hysterical tones. The American political landscape is not so neatly divided by region as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. So while the neatly coifed Southerners resorted to red-faced ranting, finger pointing and prophesies of doom, Republican Northerners, the University of Chicago types, acolytes of Milton Friedman et al., registered their philosophical opposition to any and all checks on the right to make a profit—even at the expense of public health—in more measured, pseudo-academic tones.What was puzzling was an absence of any substantial response from Democrats to either tactic. Was the Democrats’ subdued behavior merely the by-product of knowing they were on the verge of carrying the day? The one recent departure from Democratic restraint was President Obama’s courageous criticism of the sacrosanct Supreme Court’s decision to allow an unchecked flow of corporate funds into mostly Republican coffers. Such distinct criticism was not only uncharacteristic of the man who currently occupies the White House, it has become uncharacteristic of the Party as a whole. Though rare, it was enough to elicit head-shaking disbelief from our esteemed Chief Justice who seemed to smart personally from the remark.Democrats may feel that they need to tamp down the toxic rhetoric and tactics that characterize partisan politics, but there are times when it is dangerous and irresponsible to remain silent.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 26th, 2010
8:31 am
It took thirty years--almost to the day--for the true character of the men and women who spearheaded the assault on American values initiated in the Reagan era to luridly reveal itself. The greatest danger is to basically agree with the demagogues and thugs, cave in to cynicism and conclude, after all, that the encyclopedic array of sociopathology we are now being exposed to is the "real" America. Instead, it is a dark stratum in American life that has always been with us, the America of vigilante-ism and organizations like the Klan. Barely reconstituted Dixiecrats and the spiritual descendents of Joe McCarthy could pretend to be within the mainstream of American political life while they were having their way, digging us into so deep an economic and social hole that their much despised New Deal liberalism could never again be resurrected, but the election of a Black president, the collapse of the financial house of cards they constructed, the mere impulse to bring about reforms that would place us within the family of civilized nations, have all served to put them over the edge. They are desperate, and, it would be profoundly dangerous to ignore them.
53.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 2nd, 2010
1:03 pm
The list grows--not only of unelected representatives--in this case the unchosen selecting the next unchosen--but of men and women who, by a standard that once prevailed, are barely qualified for public office. New York State may be an egregious example of the phenomenon, but it is certainly not the only case. It is perhaps no mystery that the "best and the brightest" now shy away from elective office, but if the downward trend continues, the crumbling at the foundations of our struggling democracy will be in ever deeper trouble.
Recommend Recommended by 6 Readers
82.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 9th, 2010
7:11 am
Let's see now, what would cause prices to go down in this country? Most Americans are so far removed from what the Great Depression was like that they can't see much harm in prices going down. Nor do they really understand the mechanism by which such a phenomenon could occur. Most Americans worry a great deal about inflation, some even conjuring up images of Weimar Germans rolling wheelbarrows full of Marks to buy a loaf of bread. Most Americans are blind to the "benefits" that inflation can bring. Most Americans wish they could buy lots of gold as a hedge against inflation. (For instruction, many of us might consider the impact on our net wealth of the decline in the value of our homes--a rather obvious instance of deflation.) Yet, unemployment stubbornly lingers, and rather than putting more Americans to work, strapped state governments lay off teachers and other workers, thus further diminishing the aggregate number of robust consumers. Declining sales taxes are one indication that consumers are tightening their belts, and, for a change, saving some cash rather than spending it. In supply and demand terms, even taking into consideration periodic upturns because of inventory depletion of certain goods, the net effect is downward pressure on prices. Lower prices mean less profits, less taxes collected, more businesses closing down, and the dread downward spiral of a market economy dependent on the citizenry spending with relative abandon becomes a frightening reality. In fact, apart from an almost eerily robust stock market that sits on the edge of its seat waiting for a bump from some technological innovation like the i-pad, most of the signs in the real world indicate that the V-shaped recovery we are all waiting for may not occur for a long time. In fact, if the warnings of Paul Krugman and other like-minded economists go unheeded, a deeper V may be lurking in the near future.
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers
582.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 16th, 2010
12:50 pm
This, on the same day that Paul Krugman insists that--in spite of everything--we need to bail out big banks. What Paul Krugman doesn't understand is that it is precisely such calls that fuel another fire, the so-called Tea Party rebellion. When banks that are "too big to fail" are threatened with failure, the only immediate response of government should be to nationalize them and then dispose of their assets as makes the most sense for the majority of tax payers rather than the same arrogant manipulators that got us where we are in the first place. Krugman and politicians of like mind may heave big sighs of exasperation at the lowly layman's lack of sophistication, but the lowly layman isn't stupid. We lowly laymen out here are just waiting fo the other shoe to drop. A jobless recovery that is celebrated only on Wall Street doesn't begin to address the need for deep reform.
Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers
33.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 24th, 2010
3:07 pm
Laying teachers off based on some measure of performance rather than seniority is a very bad idea. There are obviously forces that find the teachers' union too powerful and find the notion of teacher tenure outdated. We see echoes of this in last week's news about "rubber rooms" and Florida's toying with doing away with tenure. From the point of view of the UFT, all tenured teachers are equal and are to be treated equally. That core concept grows out of the fact that, in order to win tenure, a prospective teacher must have the appropriate university training, the appropriate courses in education, pass a licensing exam, and, perhaps most crucially, survive a three-year long probationary period. The forces that want to do away with tenure in effect want to find a way to buy good teaching on the cheap, and there is really no way to do that. Any serious program of improving the quality of teachers and guarding against keeping individuals in our classrooms who would be better off pursuing some other vocation must aim at investing in the crucial stages of the process leading up to tenure. More needs to be spent on teacher education, licensing exams must test for the appropriate skills, and the probationary period must have not just real rigor, but real and intensive support for the teacher-in-training. There are far too many variables completely outside of the control of the individual classroom teacher to make anything approaching a fair evaluation of merit and far too many opportunities for administrators or school districts with their own agendas to treat teachers unfairly. Tenure is a right and an honor that needs to be maintained within the profession.
Recommend Recommended by 32 Readers
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 26th, 2010
6:34 pm
First, a \"super minority\" blocks legislation and debate that a clear majority of the American people favor; they then go on to argue disingenuously, illogically, that they are the true representatives of the people. What makes this spectacle even more frustrating and alarming is that they further argue that since the Democratic majority is out of touch with popular sentiment, more Republicans need to be elected in the November elections. What this pattern clearly calls for is a rededication of the Democratic Party leadership which seems strangely stoic in the face of this strategy. The party should be enforcing discipline among so-called Blue Dogs and putting out the call to voters that what the last year has proven is that President Obama's vision can only be realized by increasing Democratic margins. If the president and the party have been ineffectual, it is because they have been forced to decide between compromise and getting nothing at all done. It would only take a few more House and Senate Democrats elected to Congress to finally address the many urgent needs that thirty years of good government under siege has wrought.
Vincent Amato
New York City
May 12th, 2010
11:38 am
From Pete Peterson on down, the writing is on the wall, viz., \"austerity\" programs for the working classes, the destruction of all unions, the end of all pension programs, the further privatization of functions long seen as falling within the province of governments. The outrage that is expressed wholesale in the media toward the alleged greed of public sector employees and the unions which represent them is far more intense than anything expressed toward the one percent of the population in this country and others which has sequestered the lion's share of the common wealth. And yet, in the midst of this firestorm of propaganda, I find myself focusing on some of the small things, like the fact exposed in the film \"Food, Inc.\" that where once the FDA here in the U.S. had 5,000 inspectors, it now has 700, and we are in danger of being poisoned by the meat and poultry we consume. There are seemingly infinite examples of how deregulation and unfettered business practices endanger us and the planet we live on. The fractal array of these factoids add up to a system which is in grave crisis. Since we seem no longer to fear a threat from socialistic thinking, one has to wonder why reason should not prevail. A world-wide regimen of progressive taxation seems a good place to start.
16.
Vincent Amato
New York City
May 18th, 2010
10:11 am
Last week one of the PBS television stations played a documentary about John Lindsay's career as mayor. The program served as a chilling reminder of the turmoil that was taking place during that period. I was a twenty-three year-old teacher in a Bedford-Stuyvesant junior high school when Lindsay first took office in 1966. Like many of my generation, I was felt myself both a witness to and a participant in the historic events taking place during that period. As is your usual wont, you take a spin on history that does not fit the reality, but instead subtly implies that it is the--what shall we call it--restoration? counter-revolution? that we have lived with since the inception of the Reagan administration has vastly improved our lives. Yes, calm has been restored. Beyond mere calm, what we seem presently to have is a catatonic state. Few Americans, perhaps particularly few New Yorkers would choose to return to a period marked by assassinations, urban insurrections, high crime rates, three-month long school strikes and urban decay. Yet, in the midst of all of that turmoil, there was hope for a better future. Instead, our society (and that includes all of us) settled. Out of frustration and weariness, we replaced that hope with ceaseless nesting, the quest for a comfort zone based on acquiring things. Money rules. The poor are still with us, our society is more racially segregated here in the North than the old South once was, and we drug ourselves, when it isn't with actual phramaceuticals, with the endless entertainments and distractions from a reality we once dreamed would be very different.
Recommend Recommended by 30 Readers
59.
Vincent Amato
New York City
May 20th, 2010
1:04 pm
The current wisdom that Paul Ehrlich's prediction of a devastating population explosion was wrong (merely because the application of ammonium nitrate to our soils allowed us to feed teeming billions) is one of the great lies of the period we live in. As has been documented from just about every perspective of late, our planet simply cannot sustain current populations let alone rationally prepare for another three billion or so. Moreover, in the literature of the NPOs and NGOs, it has become at best politically incorrect, even taboo, to call for population control measures. The only real check on rising birth rates is a rising standard of living; thus the problem aggregates in the poorest countries and calls for birth control even have to bear the disingenuous onus of racism. In the 1960s, what gets summarized in the narrative as "the pill" frightened conservatives because it attacked a core tenet of their belief systems, namely, that human beings could have some control over their own lives. So long as we delay addressing this problem, we live with the constant threat of over-fishing, over-farming, over-deforestation on the one hand, and worst of all, a deep decline in the quality of life for all the planet's inhabitants. As usual, what keeps us from acknowledging and attempting to reverse the current global population trend are the billions of dollars that the trend puts into the coffers of just a few of us Earthlings.
Recommended Recommended by 1 Reader
45.
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 1st, 2010
9:51 am
It is we, the American people, who must ultimately bear responsibility for each ratcheting up of state terror as the Israeli modus operandi. It is the de facto silence of U.S. policy makers--where it is not our suspected outright sponsorship or encouragement--that gives extremists in Israel carte blanche to carry out such operations. Israel almost casually ignores all international law, receives the opprobrium of the nations of the world, and gets support from the U.S. alone. The sparks fly ever closer to the Middle East powder keg, and when the blowback inevitably occurs, we will, just as inevitably, blame the victims.
Recommend Recommended by 60 Readers
135.
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 4th, 2010
1:06 pm
Just to take the long view for a moment in order to respond to yet another conservative riff on the superiority of profit-driven private enterprise over government programs. Looking back, it appears that one of the worst coincidences in modern history was the election in both England and America of conservative leaders at the very time that the old Soviet Union was falling apart. The way we and the English tell the story, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher brought down the communist regimes almost single-handedly. While both leaders were elected out of desperation by respective electorates driven by exhaustion and fear at the end of the 1970s, and "saved" their nations by attacks on the working class and redistributing wealth to the richest of their citizens, initiating a series of unsustainable bubbles to do so, the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself, giving up the faith with only a random shot or two being fired. Conservatives chose to celebrate the occasion as an almost divinely inspired sign of the superiority of Western laissez-faire policies. Yet, in the years since 1989, the West, now free from the threat or interference of an opposing economic ideology, has used its newfound freedom to limp from one crisis to another. Faced with one embarrassing economic debacle after another, and with no evil empire to blame, conservatives employ the only tactic available to them, namely, to turn their verbal assaults on such dread domestic enemies as teachers' unions whom they portray as remnants of now moribund socialistic institutions. Not even the 2008 financial collapse or the mischief of an oil giant like BP can shake their faith in the superiority of unregulated, unchecked profiteering, since, after all, there really is no alternative. "Look what happened to the Soviet Union," they mutter sotto voce. And they profess to be subtle in their thinking.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
While the New York Times and other U.S. media may rush to bury the story of Israel's massacre on the high seas, there are millions around the world who cannot shake their outrage at this incident. While yours, Mr. Cohen, is a thoughtful piece, it does not begin to deal with the scale of the crime committed and therefore seems more than a bit detached from reality. Israeli behavior gives new, darkly grim meaning to the term overkill, sometimes referred to as its asymmetrical responses to perceived threats. Israel presently behaves like the murderer who doesn't hesitate to murder again since one can only be executed for the crime once. Policies born of such thinking can only grow more and more deeply immoral. The fact that this kind of arrogant bullying only takes place because the state of Israel feels immune to sanctions from its greatest benefactor may contain the seeds of its own downfall. More and more Americans want to distance themselves from such behavior, more and more Americans are reflecting on the fact that it is their tax dollars that are contributing to this nightmare.
3
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 18th, 2010
12:53 am
Although difficult to assert without seeming to have some political axe to grind, I would argue, Dr. Krugman, that what we are seeing is the beginning of the demise of capitalism as we have known it. Just as soviet-style socialism seemed an abysmal failure and eventually imploded, capitalism simply can no longer function as it once did. Why this is so is an interesting question. What is fairly clear is that all of the tweaking of the dials that has taken place since the end of the brief period of rising standards of living at least in the advanced nations after the end of WWII are no longer effective. Going off the gold standard, the intentional destruction of the union movement, the demise of rational funding for all variety of social welfare funding, the give away to the rich (in the perhaps disingenous hope of a trickle down effect, outsourcing of manufacturing to nations where wages were (repeat, were) a mere fraction of what workers once could commnand in the advanced nations--none of these has had much of an effective life span. I do not believe that anything sinister is going on here. The liberal democracies have just run out of any solution they can imagine allowing to be put in place. This is now a global crisis that, to power an unpleasant word from another venue, will undoubtedly require major restructuring. It appears we will have to wait until things get worse, much worse, unfortunately, until we see whether the traditional capitalists will go down as the soviets did, that is, without a shot being fired.
Recommend Recommended by 135 Readers
Friday, January 14, 2011
With a Nod to Emily Post
I watched New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's State of the State message and found that, in keeping with the Orwellian nature of our time, almost unfathomable vacuity was greeted by uproarious applause. True, most of the applause came from his fellow Republicans, but the volume and duration of the hand-clapping and deep-throated roars of approval from his party cohorts easily lent the impression that he had the unanimous approval of his audience. Now, the man stands for basically nothing, but he puts his emptiness out there with such fire and conviction that, if you blinked, you might be deluded into thinking that he is driven by deep moral urges. His speech contained no surprises, just repetition of the Big Lie of our historical moment, namely, that the answer to all of or problems lies in frugal governance, a goal our nation has apparently been thwarted from attaining by school teachers, a lazy, incompetent and greedy lot collecting fat paychecks and even fatter pensions. I soon had the chilling realization that this guy is so good at this act that he will almost undoubtedly be his party's candidate for the presidency, and, barring some unforeseeable change in the political climate, there should be a Christie in the oval office in January of 2013.
The notion that the fat in teachers' wages and pensions, (and, yes, feel free to throw in the excesses of other such recalcitrant unionists as cops and fire fighters), constitutes enough cash to make a significant dent in the trillions of dollars of debt that thirty years of rule by the acolytes of Milton Friedman left this country with is a notion that anyone with a decent education should be able to see through in a New York minute. Oh, but wait a minute, the reason so few Americans are decently educated is all those guys and gals with the chalk on their fingers just going through the motions until their pension checks can be forwarded to the French Riviera. Any way you look at it, school teachers are to blame for all of our ills.
Well, what can you expect from a Republican, right? Umm... Then I realized that just a few days earlier, I had heard a remarkably similar argument made in the inauguration speech of none other than a man whose Democratic Party credentials are unimpeachable. Young Andrew Cuomo, fruit of the loins of Liberal Saint Mario, had also railed against teachers, decried the unions that represent them, made belt-tightening and austerity budgets sound as if they were mandates posted to the church doors by some divinely inspired reformer. A phallic finger punctuating his every point, an incantatory delivery the rhythm of which was only a little undercut by his resorting to a slide show, Cuomo, like Christie, did his magic and made something out of nothing. Addressing himself to the needs of a state legislature considered just a little less dysfunctional than that of Mississippi's and recently instructed in democracy by a woman abuser and an indicted felon, he let us know in no uncertain terms that he would bang heads together, lock the good lawmakers in a room if necessary, if that's what it took to have them get his program of union-busting and cuts to already grossly underfunded social programs in full gear.
And then, spinning ever deeper into the vortex as I listened to Governor Christie, echoes of President Obama's commission on budget reform assaulted me. Why, they were all reading from the same text! Too much the Harvard man to attack directly the very people who helped elect him in the first place, (those tenured, over-indulged teachers working three-hour days only ten months a year), his two-pronged cure for the national malaise added a call for charter schools to the cry for cuts, austerity, belt-tightening, etc.
A few days later, news came out of that Athens of the Southwest, the proud state of Arizona, home to the senator who gave us Sarah Palin, that yet another deranged mass murderer had crawled out of our deeply troubled ethos, this time instructed to count among his many victims a member of congress, a federal judge and a nine year-old girl. I steeled myself against the prospect of the "analysis" that inevitably accompanies these all too frequent tragic events. No amount of preparation, however, would prove adequate to keeping me from the despair brought on by the reality of the rhetoric that began to flow.
Oh, the cries for restraint, for civility, for a courtly spirit of compromise! Like a drowning man, all of the many events that should have prompted an impassioned response from the robot in the White House came in on me like a tsunami. When Tea Party thugs were shouting down revered political leaders, resorting to essentially brown-shirt methods, why was our most eloquent president not throwing a log on the fire and chatting with us via our HD-TV sets calmly explaining the dangers of such methods? Instead of fireside chats, we got silence or occasional platitudes. No passion. No attempt to educate, to lead. President Obama had compromised away the public option in health care. In that same spirit, he had allowed, during a period when many Americans were out of work or watching their standard of living deteriorate, a budget compromise that gave tax advantages to millionaires and billionaires in the full knowledge that there would be no "trickle down" to the commoners. He never lost his cool, always driving home his core belief that one had to work with the other side. He is too circumspect to often resort to the Christie/Cuomo finger jab.
Now, it appears, the savagery that took place in Tucson will be used to further calls for compromise, for courtliness, for conciliation. When, in the presidential election of 2012, Republican nominee Christie runs against Democratic nominee Cuomo, we will have achieved the ultimate in political politesse--complete agreement.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The Stolen Chinese Vase
"Ms. Porter said the sellers had no knowledge of how the vase came to be in their parents’ possession, although they believed it had been in the family since the 1930s. One theory, according to Ivan Macquisten, the editor of Antiques Trade Gazette, a British magazine, was that it could have been among the treasures looted by British troops when they sacked the imperial palaces in Beijing during the second Opium War, from 1856 to 1860.""Qing Dynasty Relic Yields Record Price at Auction," New York Times, November 12, 2010
I am not sure whether we should be outraged--or just amused--at the sale of a Chinese vase (an estimated 89.5 million dollars) that was part of the "loot" taken by the British during the Opium Wars. Students of Chinese history are well versed in the endless tales of precious art and artifacts being stolen from China and ending up in Europe and America either in museums, or on someone's mantle or just stashed in an attic.
If Greece were as rich as China, we might see similar bids coming out of Athens to effect the return of what the world now calls "the Elgin marbles." That the Parthenon, the greatest icon of Western Civilization, remains bereft of its frieze statuary as a result of what can only be seen as outright theft by an English lord, an individual who, like many in the Anglo-American world, no doubt saw himself as a natural heir to the Greco-Roman legacy, is just one small example of the lèse majesté those of us living in the lands of the conquerors take for granted.
I shall never forget my experience upon first visiting the British Museum in the late 1960s of just happening upon the great horse's head that was once part of the Parthenon. In those days, if memory serves, the piece was more or less absent-mindedly placed in a rather dark and dusty stairwell leading to one of the galleries. It was a breath-taking experience. At that point in my life, I will confess to having been completely unaware of the history of what had led to pieces of the Parthenon being essentially stashed in London. I had never heard the term "Elgin Marbles." On the other hand, my recent liberal education had filled me with respect, awe, even affection for ancient Greek art and literature. Coming upon the frieze itself was a profoundly stirring experience. To stand before the sinewy arm of Apollo rearing his steed out of the ocean depths to steer the sun across the arc of the sky brought to life thousands of mere words upon the pages of books. "Why is this here?" I wondered.
That experience was life-changing in more ways than one. It helped me to understand the power of great art, the power of great ideas to inspire great art and of the incredible human faculties that can be unleashed in us when we are so inspired. Mankind at its best, one might say. Very elevating. Very depressing, on the other hand, was the feeling that almost simultaneously arose in me that our most venerated museums can be seen as huge warehouses of stolen artifacts.
More recently in my life, during the early 2000s, I came to make several trips to China. Up until those visits my interest in China was primarily historical and political in nature. Making and preparing for those trips set me upon a period of doing more reading in the subject. As a visiting fellow with an educators' tour sponsored by the China Society, (located here in New York in a town house of East 65th Street), I was taken to Dunhuang to visit the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. If Apollo's sinewy arm had set my mind reeling, I experienced no less a reaction to the incredible Buddhist art work contained in the many caves of Dunhuang. Yet, that experience, too, ended up being both intensely inspirational and depressing at the same time.
By this time, I had read histories of the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion replete with tales of the good wives of British officers taking off bolts of precious silks and of soldiers throwing precious golden artifacts out of windows onto the grounds of the Summer Palace thinking that artifacts in such numbers were surely common brass rather than precious gold. I had even been shocked to learn that my ostensible benefactor, the somewhat stodgily respectable China Institute itself, owed its very existence to still extant reparations payments paid by the Chinese for its "crimes" during the Boxer Rebellion.
Now, as I circulated through the caves with my colleagues, I became witness to the very real emotional impact that the "removal" of a national heritage can have upon the people who suffer such losses. "Stolen!" came the cry of our young curator as he pointed to various spaces on the cave walls where ancient frescoes has been peeled off and sent via camel caravans and railways to the various European capitals. For this young man, the intersect between the politics of imperialism and a nation's art was not just a subject for an elective in an art history program. He took it personally.
The experience led me to read Peter Hopkirk's great work, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, which chronicles the extent to which Westerners felt entitled to just walk off with an unwary or powerless nation's
treasures. In the process of telling his story, Hopkirk also lets us in on the many debates that have taken place around the subject. A common argument is that we, that is enlightened Westerners, are just better at caring for such objects. This argument gained some ammuniton not long ago when the Taliban in Afgahanistan destroyed two enormous ancient Buddhas citing them as "idolatrous and anti-Islamic." Those who make the argument choose, on the other hand, not to mention the many works of art "safely" secured in Western museums that were destroyed in bombing raids during the second world war. It has to be admitted that there can be little doubt that ideologues can be as dangerous for art works as thieves or poor preservation, but it is hard to see how anyone gets a free ride in this debate.So we are now faced with the prospect of the Chinese buying back just one such object. Perhaps, in a sane world, the Porters would just have given the piece back to its proper owners, just as the English might begin crating the Parthenon's statuary free of charge and flying it back in a cargo plane on the next available flight. What that little vase seems to represent now, however, is that China, after years of being victimized by Western powers, followed by a dalliance with socialism that, in terms of its long history, lasted no longer than the blink of an eye, has now come fully to terms with the ruling axiom of our global historical moment: money talks.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Am I Bitter? You Bet I Am!
I am proud of having once found myself making the observation that "the United States without New York City is basically Australia." Now that we have the election results in for the 2o10 mid-term elections, I may have to modify that--we are basically Australia even with New York City. Why is anyone surprised? Why all the musings and head-scratching by media commentators over how to explain the Republican wave and the success of the lunatic fringe Tea Party? That, my friends, is who we are. The U.S. has two cousins, the lasting inheritance of British colonialism, namely, South Africa and Australia. We are really more alike than most anyone will acknowledge: two former slave states and a continental island nation that still subjugates what it calls its aboriginal population. Prior to his death a short time ago, during a talk at the 92nd Street Y, the writer Norman Mailer was asked to account for the behavior of the American people during the Bush era. "Fifty percent of the American people are stupid," was his knee-jerk response. Well, with all due respect for Norman, I disagree. It's not about intelligence; it's about ingrained attitudes, what some proudly point to as "American exceptionalism."
Take a whirlwind tour through U.S. history and you will find that in the 221 years since our constitution was ratified, there have really been only two critical junctures--the Civil War and the Great Depression. Two instances when the country was basically forced into change. In both cases, capitalism was just barely saved from, in the first instance, the spread of a plantation, latifundia culture that would have left the country looking more like a banana republic than a modern nation state, and, in the second instance, the prospect of the country going either fascist or communist. In Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the nation produced two leaders who to this very day are vilified wholesale by American reactionaries as traitors to the true American spirit, yet both men saved America for its unique brand of capitalism. And, if one reflects a bit more deeply, what will also emerge from the effort is that the period of the Civil War and the New Deal were the single, singular episodes of anything resembling radical change in the landscape of the nation. Some may believe I am overlooking the tumult of the 1960s with its anti-war, civil and women's rights rebellions, but rebellions they were, distinct from the far deeper changes that took place in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter were martialed by two presidents; the one attempt at a electing a spiritual leader to oversee change in the 1960s, George McGovern, resulted in an historic landslide defeat. He lost every state but Massachusetts.
The bottom line? For all but two or three decades of its history, this country has been a bastion of laissez-faire capitalism and private ownership more resembling a plutocracy than a democracy. Its permanent status as such is carefully nurtured by a homegrown aristocracy pulling strings behind closed doors, fiercely dedicated to protecting its ever-growing hoard of wealth and privilege and taking full advantage of the availability of an almost endless resource of more visible troops among Southern racists, religious fundamentalists, orthdox Catholics, orthodox Jews, strivers and social climbers as well as virulently anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-social democrat immigrants here to finally "make it." Unfortunately, they are not stupid. On the contrary, they are intelligent adherents to their doctrine, their gospel, of wealth and of the promise of privilege.
Still by far the richest nation on Earth, with its 14 trillion dollar annual GDP, equal to the sum of the GDPs of the next three richest economies, the much feared China as well as Japan's and Germany's, (the latter two still hosting huge U.S. military bases). Moreover, its influence far exceeds what mere numbers can reveal. The U.S. economy now serves as a model for the world's economies. Over the coming months, we will be treated to speeches from an endless series of Cassandras warning us about the dangers of deficits and national debt. Now, as recent big-spender Republican administrations have clearly demonstrated, Republicans have no problem with debts and deficits, so long, that is, as those funds are not expended on social programs. They will attempt to club to death the few remaining unions, (here, too, a contradiction, they loved unions in Poland under Lech Walesa), crowbar open the treasure chests of the few remaining pension funds, and go on a Klan raid of privatization, privatizing everything in their path--from prisons, to schools and libraries, to the military, to the very air we breathe. A pay-as-you-go and a dog-eat-dog universe, since they will also attempt to dry up the funds of all regulatory agencies, particularly the SEC, recently given new power--and a new budget--by our floundering would-be savior in the White House.
We got our short-lived consolation prize in the form of the young President Obama for enduring the eight years of outrages in the previous administration. Turns out it was just an apology note, but its perfume has already dissipated, and now we stuff the note in a drawer and resume business as usual. Good night, and God bless America.
Take a whirlwind tour through U.S. history and you will find that in the 221 years since our constitution was ratified, there have really been only two critical junctures--the Civil War and the Great Depression. Two instances when the country was basically forced into change. In both cases, capitalism was just barely saved from, in the first instance, the spread of a plantation, latifundia culture that would have left the country looking more like a banana republic than a modern nation state, and, in the second instance, the prospect of the country going either fascist or communist. In Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the nation produced two leaders who to this very day are vilified wholesale by American reactionaries as traitors to the true American spirit, yet both men saved America for its unique brand of capitalism. And, if one reflects a bit more deeply, what will also emerge from the effort is that the period of the Civil War and the New Deal were the single, singular episodes of anything resembling radical change in the landscape of the nation. Some may believe I am overlooking the tumult of the 1960s with its anti-war, civil and women's rights rebellions, but rebellions they were, distinct from the far deeper changes that took place in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter were martialed by two presidents; the one attempt at a electing a spiritual leader to oversee change in the 1960s, George McGovern, resulted in an historic landslide defeat. He lost every state but Massachusetts.
The bottom line? For all but two or three decades of its history, this country has been a bastion of laissez-faire capitalism and private ownership more resembling a plutocracy than a democracy. Its permanent status as such is carefully nurtured by a homegrown aristocracy pulling strings behind closed doors, fiercely dedicated to protecting its ever-growing hoard of wealth and privilege and taking full advantage of the availability of an almost endless resource of more visible troops among Southern racists, religious fundamentalists, orthdox Catholics, orthodox Jews, strivers and social climbers as well as virulently anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-social democrat immigrants here to finally "make it." Unfortunately, they are not stupid. On the contrary, they are intelligent adherents to their doctrine, their gospel, of wealth and of the promise of privilege.
Still by far the richest nation on Earth, with its 14 trillion dollar annual GDP, equal to the sum of the GDPs of the next three richest economies, the much feared China as well as Japan's and Germany's, (the latter two still hosting huge U.S. military bases). Moreover, its influence far exceeds what mere numbers can reveal. The U.S. economy now serves as a model for the world's economies. Over the coming months, we will be treated to speeches from an endless series of Cassandras warning us about the dangers of deficits and national debt. Now, as recent big-spender Republican administrations have clearly demonstrated, Republicans have no problem with debts and deficits, so long, that is, as those funds are not expended on social programs. They will attempt to club to death the few remaining unions, (here, too, a contradiction, they loved unions in Poland under Lech Walesa), crowbar open the treasure chests of the few remaining pension funds, and go on a Klan raid of privatization, privatizing everything in their path--from prisons, to schools and libraries, to the military, to the very air we breathe. A pay-as-you-go and a dog-eat-dog universe, since they will also attempt to dry up the funds of all regulatory agencies, particularly the SEC, recently given new power--and a new budget--by our floundering would-be savior in the White House.
We got our short-lived consolation prize in the form of the young President Obama for enduring the eight years of outrages in the previous administration. Turns out it was just an apology note, but its perfume has already dissipated, and now we stuff the note in a drawer and resume business as usual. Good night, and God bless America.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Lyndon Johnson's 1964 World's Fair Prophesies
For those of us of a certain age, it seems difficult to believe that it has been nearly fifty years since the last world's fair took place here in New York City. It was 46 years ago, to be exact, that President Lyndon Johnson arrived in Flushing, Queens to deliver a speech on the fair's opening day, April 22, 1964. It had been six months--to the day--since Johnson had been thrust into the presidency upon the assassination of President Kennedy. The country was still in mourning, and the early days of the Johnson administration had largely been devoted to restoring confidence and some optimism to a people still grieving and still in shock.A time would come, in the not too distant future, when Johnson would not be able to appear in New York City without thousands of anti-war protesters greeting him with the chilling chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?", but that still lay ahead. It was a sad honeymoon period in the Johnson presidency, but compared to what would come later, a honeymoon it was. Still ahead, too, was the 1964 election in which the prospect of a President Barry Goldwater would so frighten the American people that Johnson would finally take office in his own right with one of the greatest landslides in the history of American presidential elections. And thus, the time was ideal, on a blustery spring morning on the plains of Flushing Meadow Park, for Johnson to make an inspirational speech.
I watched the speech earlier in the evening on City Classics, a television show that goes into the city's archives and takes a look at its past history, and I was struck as much by what Johnson got right in his stab at prophecy as what he got wrong. It was natural for Johnson, a product of New Deal liberalism and an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt, to turn with some pride to what the nation had achieved since the previous World's Fair held in New York City in 1939, a year in which the U.S. was still suffering through the Depression but beginning to look ahead to better times:
The last time New York had a World's fair, we also tried to predict the future. A daring exhibit proclaimed that in the 1960's it would really be possible to cross the country in less than 24 hours, flying as high as 10,000 feet; that an astounding 38 million cars would cross our highways. There was no mention of outer space, or atomic power, or wonder drugs that could destroy disease.
These were bold prophecies back there in 1939. But, again, the reality has far outstripped the vision.
Now it was Johnson's turn at the role of prophet, and, as he peered into the future, he said:
I prophesy peace is not only possible in our generation, I predict that it is coming much earlier. If I am right, then at the next world's fair, people will see an America as different from today as we are different from 1939.
They will see an America in which no man must be poor.
They will see an America in which no man is handicapped by the color of his skin or the nature of his belief--and no man will be discriminated against because of the church he attends or the country of his ancestors.
They will see an America which is solving the growing problems of crowded cities, inadequate education, deteriorating national resources and decreasing national beauty.
They will see an America concerned with the quality of American life--unwilling to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction--concerned not only that people have more, but that people shall have the best.
Although no new world's fair is currently scheduled to take place here in New York, now, half a century later, we can take stock of just how well President Johnson did in his role as a prophet. The reader may share with me a certain chill at the accuracy of his first sentence: "I prophesy peace is not only possible in our generation, I predict that it is coming much earlier." Johnson, of course, had no way of being able to foresee wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, and even if he had the ability to do so, would have considered such adventures far less significant than the over-riding concern for his generation of post World War II politicans, the Cold War with the Soviet Union. It would be exactly 50 years after the 1939 World's Fair took place that the Berlin Wall would come down, soon taking with it the entire structure of Soviet communism, and hopefully the threat of a global nuclear holocaust. Whether a product of optimism or genuine political insight, in this first prediction, Johnson amazingly got it right.
In just the brief moment in which we have to celebrate this bit of political perspicacity, however, a far different mood begins to emerge upon his uttering the very next sentence: "If I am right, then at the next world's fair, people will see an America as different from today as we are different from 1939." Listening to the speech in 1964, an audience might well have concluded, (as many did after the fall of the Soviet Union), that the differences one would see in such an America would all be positive, that there would be enormous post cold war "peace dividends." Instead, in the light of what has actually taken place since 1989, Johnson's next predictions have a truly tragic resonance.
"They will see an America in which no man must be poor."
The president who would come to initiate the "War on Poverty" during his tenure almost fifty years ago might be surprised to find that, according to the Census Bureau, one in five American children live in poverty, precisely the same number that existed while he was in office, and that, in 2009, the number of Americans living in poverty rose to an estimated 43.6 million.
"They will see an America in which no man is handicapped by the color of his skin..."
The president who, just four months after this speech would sign the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law and, a year later, sign the Voting Rights Act, might well take pride in the truly revolutionary changes that have taken place in the lives of Black Americans. That a Black man would be elected president in 2008 might both surprise and be a source of intense pride. Nevertheless, a nation in which "no man is handicapped by the color of his skin" remains an as yet unrealized (and, according to some pessimists, a systemically impossible) goal. Furthermore, the deep divisions that the '64 and '65 civil rights legislation engendered continue to play havoc not merely with the prospects for racial harmony and integration, (the Kerner Commission's own prophesy of "two societies, one white and one black--separate and unequal" having been largely realized), but have evolved into a "red states, blue states" dichotomy that, while there is a constant undercurrent of race, has taken on the characteristics of a far broader and deeper, almost theological schism.
"...or the nature of his belief--and no man will be discriminated against because of the church he attends or the country of his ancestors."
On this score, Johnson can certainly be forgiven his lack of foresight since it would be hard to find even a single American who, in 1964, could have foreseen the era of Islamophobia, "Islamofascists" and the mere possibility of a debate about locating a Muslim house of worship on a particular piece of real estate. It would probably be indelicate even to speculate on the images that the word "Muslim" conjured up in the citizenry of 1964. "Gobalization" as we now know it was more the stuff of science fiction novels than a real prospect for the near future.
"They will see an America which is solving the growing problems of crowded cities, inadequate education, deteriorating national resources and decreasing national beauty."
Here, too, the pace of progress has been disappointing--to put it mildly. For a while it seemed that our nation was going in the direction not of crowded but of depopulated cities, depopulated by the aftermath of "burn, baby, burn," white flight to the suburbs, a spreading rust belt and red-lining by the worlds of banking and finance. One may no longer see the word "ghetto" in print, its having been replaced by the euphemistic "inner-city" jargon, but the ghettos are still there. Little progress has been made in education reform, and black children in Northern ghettos are now more segregated than their brothers and sisters in the schools of the former Confederacy. In spite of the greatest accumulation of wealth in human history, the multi-billionaires of our own era seem not to have the propensity for building libraries and museums that the so-called "robber barons" of the past bestowed upon urban centers in the past, most American cities now having been abandoned for all-white enclaves and gated communities on what was not so long ago farm land. The preoccupation of President Johnson's wife, "Lady Bird" Johnson, with highway beautification now seems quaint, her desire to "leave this splendor for our grandchildren" a piquant historical artifact in an era of profound decay of infrastructure.
"They will see an America concerned with the quality of American life--unwilling to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction--concerned not only that people have more, but that people shall have the best." (Bold mine.)
It is here, in President Johnson's final prophesy, that we find the key, the very essence of why so much that his speech looks forward to has failed to be realized. While his speech must be credited with having alluded to this core understanding of how a "great society" is maintained and developed, tragically, the nation has proven itself all too willing "to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction." It is our willingness to accept public deprivation that explains the absence of public transportation, health, housing and education standards that the rest of what we proudly call the "civilized world" takes for granted. The New Deal liberalism that produced Lyndon Johnson's public philosophy has now been subsumed under the rhetoric of creeping socialism and dread Europeanization. The prevailing philosophy of the post-modern United States, antithetical to the naive utopianism of both old world philosophies and the hopeful optimism that prevailed at both the 1939 and 1964 world's fairs has resulted in a land resembling Brecht's Mahogonny, a land dominated by what another European writer, the Englishman Thomas Carlyle, in 1839 described as "the cash nexus." "You get what you pay for," Mr. and Mrs. America. No state subsidized bullet trains for us, no national health insurance, no adequately funded public schools. A nation not merely of two races--separate and unequal, but of two classes--separate and unequal: the very, very rich and the rest of us.
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