Fantasyland - flickr creative commons - PincessAshley

I like to see and read the entries from Resilient Communities and Democracy at Work and other similar sites.  Both offer some good information.

And Richard Wolff is spot on in his evaluation of how we got to where we are in most respects.

I feel however that nearly all these ideas leave out one one basic calculation and that is the ever increasing population.  The continued strain we are putting on the resources that we have, which are finite. Worse yet climate change is even now diminishing our available resources with longer and more sever droughts and interrupted growing seasons.

When this country or continent was being settled it was a capitalist’s and serf’s wet dream come true. Land as far as the eye see. There was some place one could grown just about anything or raise cattle or what not. At the beginning of the industrial revolution, resources were there pretty much for the taking. Rivers could be dammed for energy and coal – and later oil – were abundant. Iron and copper and zinc and on and on.

Fresh clean water and air and what not.  But in a little over 200 years this has ceased to be the case. Our oil fields have gone dry. Coal is now too dirty to use in any scale and it’s mining pollutes the rivers and streams.  Any river that could be dammed for energy has already  been.   Any land that is good growing is spoken for. That which is left is rocky or desert or both.

But even this presentation tends to be a bit on the optimistic side as it does not truly take into account the effect of population growth and climate change.   Nor does it take into account the fact humans rarely behave in a reasonable and rational manner when faced with their backs increasingly against the wall.

Ives Smith at Naked Capitalism  shows how the increasing student debt is even now dragging on the economy as new graduates are finding it more and more difficult – if not impossible – find employment.

And yet most – if not nearly everyone – seems to think we can some how avoid the inevitable or make it somehow less painful.   I see this as highly unlikely as long was we insist on growth in any area. And stopping growth in population seems to be the one area nobody wants to deal with. Yet it is the one area that needs to be dealt with the most.  As long as humans insist on creating more humans, it simply is not possible to have a sustainable future that is not some dystopic hell.

“Orwell was wrong. Huxley…now there’s a prophet for you.”   Anonymous

Pepe Escobar gave a lecture at the 13th Seminary of Political Solidarity Don Juan Chavez in memoriam at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Part of which has been reproduce in Asia Times and Counter Punch.   A fairly scathing taking of world civilization or brutal reality check – depending on ones point of view.  Dealing with how “Casino capitalism – aka turbocharged neoliberalism – is ruthlessly destroying the last vestiges of the welfare state and the egalitarian consensus in the industrialized West”  Where -

Integration, socialization and multiculturalism are being corroded by disintegration, segregation, and widespread de-socialization – a direct consequence of the David Harvey-coined notion of “dis-accumulation” (society devouring its own).

And that -

This state of things is what Flemish philosopher and art historian Lieven De Cauter, in his book Entropic Empire, calls “the Mad Max phase of globalization”.

……..

An individualistic, self-indulgent, passive, easily controllable consumer drowned in a warped form of democracy that basically favors insiders – and very wealthy players; how could that be a humanist ideal? Yet the PR was so good that this is what legions in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America aspire to. But it’s still not enough for the geo-economic Masters of the Universe.

Thus post-history as the ultimate reality show. And war neoliberalism as its favorite weapon.

Indeed. I myself had come to this very conclusion when I saw that what has been passing as technological advances in the last 20 years or so were noting more than glorified play toys for college educated bourgeois. As well as better ways to kill off those who get in the way of neocon and neoliberal world control and domination.   With their heads firmly implanted in some high tech device (and up their ass) and being constantly fed a stream of misinformation, they firmly believe that everything is under control.

But as Mike Whitney points out, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Obama’s budget cuts. Retail sales are off, manufacturing is sputtering, earnings are weak, existing home sales are dropping, and durable goods are in the tank.

…….

Problems in the US are compounded by growing troubles abroad, notably the slowdown in China and the ongoing Depression in  Europe.

And that -

Let’s not kid ourselves, none of this is accidental. This whole permanent Depression-thing is just part of the plan. How could it not be? I mean, is there anyone dumb enough to believe in austerity anymore?  Even the right-wing Washington Post has given belt tightening the old heave-ho.

…….

But it doesn’t matter how discredited the policy is, the politicians are going to keep ratcheting up the pressure until they get what they want, which is, more privatization of public assets, more busting up federal unions and more dismantling critical safetynet programs. (particularly, SS, Medicare, Medicaid) Present policy has nothing to do with growing the economy or putting people back to work. It’s just plain old class warfare.

As Pepe Escobar  says neoliberals are systematically unwinding and unraveling society- A devolution for the sake of capitalism.

It goes without saying that post-history buries the Enlightenment – as favoring the emergence of all sorts of fundamentalisms. So it had also to bury international law; from bypassing the UN to launch a war on Iraq in 2003 to using a UN resolution to launch a war on Libya in 2011. And now Britain and France are taking no prisoners trying to bypass the UN or even NATO itself and weaponize the “rebels” in Syria.

So we have a New Medievalism that cannot but fit wealthy neo-theocracy – as in Saudi Arabia and Qatar; because they are Western allies, or puppets, internally they may remain medieval. Superimposed, we have the politics of fear – which essentially rules Fortress America and Fortress Europe; fear of The Other, which can be occasionally Asian but most of the time Islamic.

What we don’t have is a political/philosophical vision of the future. Or a historical political program; political parties are only worried about winning the next election.

As feudalism begot capitalism,  so capitalism is producing the new feudalism.   One need only look to Detroit or Youngstown Ohio or the mess that Sandy left that the victims are walking away from.  Or better yet the incident in Boston where Americas Gestapo and SS closed the entire city down just to find one 19 year old kid.  I hope the residents gave the request salute as they passed by their homes that they dare not leave, lest they find themselves riddled with bullet holes. “Shot while trying to escape.” I believe the term was.

Our new technology is making this as easy and efficient as turning off a light switch.

Financialization’s ultimate goal is unlimited accumulation of profit – a system where the wealthy get much wealthier and the poor get literally nothing (or, at best austerity). The real-life Masters of the Universe are a denationalized rentier class – cannot even call them noblesse, because mostly their absence of taste and critical sense is appalling, as in purveyors of unabashed bling bling. What they do is to the benefit of corporations, instead of the protecting functions of states. In this state of things military adventures become police doctrine. And a new information technology – from drones to “special” munitions – can be used against popular movements, not only in the South but also the North.

And in LA, NYC and Boston.  This whole neoliberal thought, lest ye forget, got it’s start with the so called “Best and the Brightest“  A group of capitalism worshiping intellectuals who were so afraid that communism would take over the world, they plunged head on into a war in South East Asia that would become the blueprint for neoconservatives and neoliberals from then on.

Leaving it their wake one version of dystopia after another.

Not many contemporary thinkers are equipped to thrash Left and Right in equally devastating measure. Michea tells us that both Left and Right have submitted to the original myth of capitalist thinking; this “noir anthropology” that makes Man an egoist by nature. And he asks how could the institutionalized Left have abandoned the ambition of a just, decent society – or how the neoliberal wolf has wreaked havoc among the socialist sheep.

So pick your dystopia. Fritz Lang, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Phillip K. Dick.  All just variations on the neoliberal and neoprogressive ideal of a perfect world.

Disney World - flickr creative commons

All righty now.  Two home made bombs go off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, creating enough death, injury and destruction to occupy the news cycle for  at least 24 hours. Followed by the miraculous work of our law enforcement to correctly identify the culprits from some very out of focus stills  garnered from some security cameras. Thus triggering a manhunt in Boston the like of which Boston – or any where else – has not seen. To capture a 19 year old, screwed up kid. And the people of Boston rolled over and played dead through the whole affair.  Then cheering loudly when he was caught as if Hitler and Stalin both where apprehended in the middle of some torturous act.

Even Pepe Escobar at Asia Times thinks the whole theatre smells more than a little of 10 day old halibut.

In two previous articles, for RT RTand for Asia Times Online I have looked into the superimposed levels of blowback implied by the Boston bombing.

With still so many unanswered questions regarding what took place on the ground in Boston after the bombing, it’s time to look at an extra, possible Top Ten list of lingering absurdities. And this without sidestepping other unanswered crucial questions, such as why a bomb drill – organized by Craft – was going on during the marathon at which the bombing took place; and why it was vehemently denied that a bomb drill was going on. For this current set of questions, I’m grateful for the help of Asia Times Online’s Bostonian readers.

Orwellian indeed.  And Bush is opening a Library when he should be in a cell.

What amazes me is not that this happened or how it was handled or even the official story itself. These are all pretty much par for the course.   After all even Nixon though the white wash of the JFK assassination was a load of dingos kidneys.

No what amazes me is how gullible the public is and how easily it will swallow the stories force fed to them on this and every other matter.   Those that seem to be the least likely to question the official story seem to be those of the upper crust economically. The professionals engineers for Microsoft and Dell and Apple and IBM. The Doctors and specialists in the health car professions, especially those affiliated with big hospitals. Tenured professors and middle management types. The bourgeois for lack of a better term.

Nearly all of whom are doing quite nicely as the rest of the economy is slowly sinking.  They also are those who are buying into the “recovery” that isn’t.  Like the guest post by James H. Kunstler – at Tyler Durden’s Zerohedge explains.

It’s especially remarkable that a nation with fairly deep traditions of free thought and speech, with durable institutions for purveying them (a free press), should sleepwalk into a captivity of pervasive, systematic, institutionalized lying and fraud. The people of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia suffered under such regimes at gunpoint, with boots on their necks, but in the USA of Bush and now Obama, we have conveyed ourselves to very similar circumstances willingly, like little children skipping through the gates of Disney World, with gleeful disregard for the consequences.

James H. Kunstler in this post gives a good rundown of how we got here, will stay here and what the government has been doing ever since that untidy situation in 2008, to keep the Titanic from sinking.  That what we are seeing is a contraction fed to a large extent by what he calls then end of “peak-cheap-oil”.

These calamities of capital mis-management occurred in tandem with trouble in the energy sector of the economy. The shorthand for the trouble was encapsulated in the term “Peak Oil.” For practical purposes, it should have been called “Peak Cheap Oil,” because these years in the mid-2000s marked the end of oil that was affordable under the terms of how American society was set up to run.

At every level of American society – and for Europe and Japan as well – the end of cheap, affordable oil had rather dire implications for all the common operations of life in advanced societies: food production, transportation, commerce, and especially finance. Finance – the management of a society’s accumulated wealth – was the most abstract of these systems and the one most easily upset by the implications of Peak Cheap Oil. The reason was that oil happened to be the “master resource” for generating economic growth and Peak Cheap Oil provoked a particular problem with money: Without continued growth of 3 to 5 percent a year, not enough new wealth could be generated to cover the interest on loans in the financial system. In effect, the whole system of interest became impaired, and without interest you couldn’t have the normal operations of banking.

It was pretty elementary. But the American public was not disposed to understand it, because everything in the U.S. economy worked on revolving credit, including the issuance of money itself (which was loaned into existence by the banks), and the public was addicted to debt. Loaning money into existence, of course, implied the creation of ever more debt, which came burdened with interest payments.

The American public, the media and even Washington refuses to look at any of this. All still wanting to believe that this depression/recession is temporary and will right itself eventually.  The whole drive toward austerity is reliant of this fiction.  So the books and figures are manipulated to give it as much credence as possible.  The only reason the economy has not tanked is because the Federal Reserve keeps funneling money into the financial sector. Pay no attention to that bankrupt bank behind the FED, this is the great and powerful Wizard of OZ.  All making excuses and rationalizing the governments actions at every step.

So these bourgeois with their 401Ks and personal retirement accounts and investments are the ones that Washington is trying to protect from financial disaster.  Making sure the Stock Market does not take a nose dive and there by bursting the fantasy bubble.

And these same folks will keep watching  their cable TV shows  with the right convinced that the “market works damnit” and the center left pushing their green or what ever agenda and both rationalizing why no financier is in Jail.  All convinced that it’s back to business as usual. All gleefully and naively watching the first 10 min of CNN before turning on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

The theme park is open for business and the “help” gets the shaft.

Creature From The Back Lagoon - flickr Boogeyman13

So why is it that tiny little Cyprus and the their banks are causing such consternation and high blood pressure over in Europe and why should we care ? Richard Wolff gives a good explanation with this audio clip from an interview on KPFA that I grabbed and uploaded to my web site. You can hear the whole program here if you like.

Here is the long and the short of it. The Eurozone was the outgrowth of The Common Market or EEC – European Economic Community.

The European Economic Community (EEC) was an international organisation created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957.^[1] aIts aim was to bring about economic integration, including a common market, among its six founding members: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. The EEC was also known as the Common Market in the English-speaking world and sometimes referred to as the European Community even before it was officially renamed as such in 1993.

It gained a common set of institutions along with the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) as one of the European Communities under the 1965 Merger Treaty (Treaty of Brussels).

Upon the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, the EEC was renamed the European Community (EC) to reflect that it covered a wider range of policy. This was also when the three European Communities, including the EC, were collectively made to constitute the first of the three pillars of the European Union (EU), which the treaty also founded. The EC existed in this form until it was abolished by the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon, which merged the EU’s former pillars and provided that the EU would “replace and succeed the European Community.”

Whew. That’s is essentially how it began. To allow trade between the various countries that made it up to proceed with few hindrances and eventually to have a common currency. Sounds good in theory but it has a number of flaws. For one there is a central bank but no central government behind it. It has no real power except to print money. It cannot set policy of the member states.  Nor can it set the policies of theses states banks. The states themselves remain autonomous.  When the single currency was brought forth, it was – more or less – to replace each states currency on a one for one basis, even if the exchange rate at the times was wildly different.

All of this was in and of itself a prescription for disaster.  As we all know the exuberance and risk taking by the banks both here and in Europe built up mounds of debt. Debt that eventually came due and the debtors could not pay.

So why all this fuss over Cyprus banks ? They could not be THAT big…or could they.  Well as a matter of fact and as Richard Wolff explains in the interview they are. Far bigger that this tiny country with only tourism and some maritime shipping would ever generate on it’s own.

Read the rest of this entry →

Hunger March - flickr/wikimedia commons

My old education institution in Florida – The Univ. Of Central Florida that was originally called Florida Technological Univ. – has had it’s own brush with a plot for mass violence.  The person who was plotting this however committed suicide before carrying it out.   Thought he did have the required implements of destruction.

UCF police said they received a fire alarm call around 12:20 a.m. As they responded to that call, police then received a 911 call reporting a man with a gun.

When police arrived, they found a student with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. They also found a bag of improvised explosive devices, along with a handgun and an assault weapon. - Central Florida News 13

We may never really know the motivations behind this individual or his actions and proposed actions but it’s safe bet is was some personal problem or agenda that drove him to it.

There a those who like to see such situations as some idealistic political and/or religious or some other kind of plot. In most cases those who are involved are just people  who feel they have been pushed too far and are generally just really pissed off and desperate.  Desperation can drive people to do things and behave in a manner they would not under other circumstances.

If one looks at the history to most political and/or economic upheavals, they were generally started by people who had “Had enough” and were desperate. Even the Russian revolution caught Lenin by surprise when it began even though he and others had plotted the over throw of the Tzar, it was a spontaneous event  by desperate people that initiated it.  The same for the French revolution and nearly all other such situations.

And now with the current situation in Europe and the EU ministers decision on the Cyprus bank bail outs, they are sowing and fertilizing the seeds of another upheaval.

There’s been a great deal of discussion of how the deal came about, with a particularly detailed account at the Wall Street Journal. The new stance at the creditor nations and the ECB is that there will be “private sector participation” which is bureaucrat-speak for haircuts to the people who funded the banks. And in the fracas over renegotiating the pact so as to make it less unpalatable to the locals, the Eurozone officials have made clear they don’t care how Anastasiades skins this particular cat as long as he comes up with €5.8 billion from local deposits. Banks were due to be closed Monday on Cyprus for a holiday; officials are now considering imposing a bank holiday on Tuesday. Funds have been frozen in the meantime, producing what is likely to be the emblematic photo of this crisis, of a man trying to break into his bank branch:

. . . . .

Now the EU officials could easily calm nervous depositors by announcing an ECB-backstopped deposit guarantee, instead of the current national system which depends on not-exactly-credible central banks. Germany and its fellow surplus countries have hesitated about proceeding with the necessary steps to further economic integration (notice how the plan to implement eurozone wide bank supervision, which Germany insisted was a precondition to Eurozone-level deposit guarantees, has languished?). Germany is trying to maintain policies that are contradictory: it wants to continue to have large trade surpluses, yet not fund its trade partners; its wants debtors to meet their obligations, yet refuses to allow either enough in the way of fiscal deficits or monetary easing to keep debtor countries from falling into deflationary spirals, which assure default. Germany’s failure to relent on any of these conditions means that what breaks will be the financial system. – Naked Capitalism

It took FDR meeting with the heads of the unions and communists and socialist parties to convince him that this country was very close to another revolution in the 1930s.  It was this sort of situation that brought Hitler to power and also brought down a number of leaders in other countries. People are not stupid and when they see that they are being sacrificed for the good of those in the upper crust..when they feel they have no say or recourse…when they feel desperate, they will eventually take matters into their own hands.

The PTB need to realize and be aware that it’s groups of highly desperate and pissed of people that will force a change in the current situation for good or bad. Not some high minded organized plot by some subversive element. Though these elements will often take credit for it, they generally are not the instigators.

Euro - flickr creative commons

The on going and deepening economic crisis in Europe once again has come to the for front in at least a few media outlets.  Now before I go any further let me point out what has been going on in reality – at least according to Richard Wolff.  He has given a good synopsis of the situation in a number of his presentations on the economy.

The European Central bank – funded primarily by Germany, France and Belgium – has been “bailing out” various peripheral countries.  Mainly Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy. But where is the money going ? Well back to the big banks in Germany, France, Belgium and Switzerland.   That’s where. In other words it has been and continues to be a stealth bailout of these big banks, mostly by Germany.

And Germany is keeping this part quiet since Merkel and all know damn well that the German people would not put up with this if they knew this was what was really going on.  I suspect they do however and this is why this item from Ives Smith over at Nakedcapitalism is not and should not come as a big surprise.  She gives a good rundown on the situation – as linked to by Faster – and what it may mean.  Beginning with this revelation.

Data point one. One of my colleagues studied in Germany, has extensive, high level political and economic contacts there, and reads the press daily. He also describes his sang froid as “somewhere between that of a Chinese sage and a dead animal.”

Needless to say, he not prone to overstatement or overreaction and also has a propensity to makes Delphic remarks.

He said the Eurozone is over. In pretty much those words, a simple sentence, no caveats or conditionals. I nearly fell out of my chair. This apparently reflects the German recognition as a result of the Italian elections that they will not be able to surmount domestic opposition in Italy and potentially other periphery countries and would rather pull the plug than continue funding their trade partners. He said there was a fair bit of discussion of Germany leaving the Eurozone after the election. I quizzed him on how they thought they could do that, since the new DM would presumably trade at a big premium to the Euro. We discussed that the likely outcome would be further labor “reforms”. Maybe I am naive, but I don’t see how this would not undercut an critical German strength, that of the good, if also sometimes combative, relationship between German workers and management. My source finally said widespread recognition of the existential impasse at most a couple of months away. He’s never this definitive.

Germany throwing in the towel ? If Merkel’s Christian Democrats do as badly in the upcoming elections as it has been doing in the local elections recently, this is a good bet.  Since they have been footing the bill for most of this themselves. Not something that has proven popular with the German people one bit.

And with Italy in a dead lock politically,  the ministers of Portugal fearing for their safety and the police and firefighters refusing to enforce evictions in Spain – the likelihood of the enforced austerity programs IE bank bailouts  continuing apace grows dimmer and dimmer.

Greece is on the verge of exploding and imploding all at once. And other countries are taking notice. As Ives says.

Thus Greece for the Germans served pour decourager les autres, to show what would happen if you let your debt levels and finances get as badly out of whack as Greece has. But that might have backfired. Citizens in periphery countries now suffering high unemployment might decide they’d rather take more pain now and gain control over their destiny rather than face being broken later on the Trokia’s rack.

As I said, I don’t have an answer here. I’ve long thought the technocrats underestimated the risk of democratic revolt. Those tail risks are bigger than you think! The European elites beat back that threat in Greece, but Italy may (stress may) prove to be different.

Not to mention Spain and Portugal…among others.  It has been said in the past by other economists that the Euro was a bad idea poorly implemented and not really thought through . I tend to agree. I also think that Merkel’s loyally to the banks and her conservative ideology has been laid bare to the German people through all of this. Not good for her or her party and I see no way she can come out looking good.

So what does this mean for us ? Well according Ives sources in hedge funds circles, happy days are here again. But we have seen this kind of denial and naive exuberance before from Wall Street and even the FED and Treasury under Bush.  Even in the late 1920s just before the market crashed. And we actually had a manufacturing base back then.

I could be wrong but I suspect an unraveling of the Eurozone would lay bare a lot of uncomfortable realities concerning these masters of finance both in Europe and here.

Carlos Sayadyan - Famine / wikimedia commons - flickr

We like to compare ourselves to Europe and the rest of the world  a lot. Our economists do it, educators do it, health professionals do it even some politicians do it. In nearly every subject imaginable.

Those that like to extort what they call American exceptionalism and those that like to show how out of touch and behind we actually are.

Where here is one subject where most of the world has beat us from the time people originally settled here.

Famines.

Yep…and they have had a bunch of them. Sometimes killing a million or more people from starvation and/or disease and plagues. We think of these as something that happens only in third world underdeveloped countries. Not so.

The closest we have come to the kind of famines that the rest of the world endured was Year Without a Summer where there were massive crop failures in the eastern part of the country.   Even then farmers could pack up and leave and move west, which many did.

Those even in Europe did not always have that option and actually could not except to immigrate here. This was not an easy task and for most far to expensive.  A good number of these famines were responsible for the immigration to this country. Like the Great Irish Famine in which up to 1,500,000 people immigrated

While the famine was responsible for a significant increase in emigration from Ireland, of anywhere from 45% to nearly 85% depending on the year and the county, it was not the sole cause. Nor was it even the era when mass emigration from Ireland commenced. That can be traced to the middle of the 18th century, when some 250,000 people left Ireland to settle in the New World alone, over a period of some 50 years. From the defeat of Napoleon to the beginning of the famine, a period of 30 years, “at least 1,000,000 and possibly 1,500,000 emigrated”.^[89] However, during the worst of the famine, emigration reached somewhere around 250,000 in one year alone, with far more emigrants leaving from western Ireland than any other part.^[90]

A large number of which immigrated to this country.

The classic image of an Irish immigrant is led to a certain extent by racist and anti-Catholic stereotypes. In modern times, in the United States, the Irish are largely perceived as hard workers. Most notably they are associated with the positions of police officer, firefighter, Roman Catholic Church leaders and politicians in the larger Eastern Seaboard metropolitan areas.Irish Americans number over 35 million, making them the second largest reported ethnic group in the country, after German Americans. Historically, large Irish American communities have been found in Philadelphia; Chicago; Boston; New York City; Detroit; New England; Baltimore; Pittsburgh; St. Paul, Minnesota; Buffalo; Broome County; Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Bay Area. Many cities across the country have annual St Patrick’s Day parades;The nation’s largest is in New York City — one of the world’s largest parades. The parade in Boston is closely associated with Evacuation Day, when the British left Boston in 1776 during the American War of Independence. Not to be forgotten are the 56% of the people who claim Irish ancestry who are Protestant and populate large areas along the Appalachian Mountains and the southeastern United States, especially in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Arkansas and Virginia

Before the Great Hunger (“Irish Potato Famine“), in which over a million died and more emigrated,^[51] there had been the Penal Laws which had already resulted in significant emigration from Ireland.^{[citation needed]}

According to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, in 1790 there were 400,000 Americans of Irish birth or ancestry out of a total white population of 3,100,000. Half of these Irish Americans were descended from Ulster people, and half were descended from the people of Connaught, Leinster and Munster.

According to U.S. Census figures from 2000, 41,000,000 Americans claim to be wholly or partly of Irish ancestry, a group that represents more than one in five white Americans.

Not only immigration but social, political and economic upheaval can be traced to famines. Most notably the French and Russian revolutions.

A history of not having enough to eat also influences the way one eats.  Unlike here where we are used to putting whatever we can grab into our mouths and fast as possible,  in Europe – and especially in France – meals are social occasions where one takes time to savor each part of each course. And when you don’t have much of any one item, you have as many items as you can. Hence the tradition of having multi course meals.  Each served separately and prepared separately – since refrigeration came much, much later and each item had to be fresh.

These social occasions were where you talked over your day and what not.

Food wise this country has never really had it as bad as a lot of the rest of the world. Even during the depression of the 1930s, we did not ever have a situation where 100s of thousands of people died of starvation.

At least not yet………………

This is quite a good explanation of our current economic situation that Professor Wolfe gave a few years  ago at MIT. Going along with his appearance on Bill Moyers just this last week.

I know that there were a few people that were not entirely happy with his appearance on the Moyers program and thought that he had at leas pull some punches in his answers and explanations.  One has to bare in mind the audience he was trying to reach, however. Just as here.

All of whom have been indoctrinated from the very first on the superiority of the American capitalistic system. And all of whom would have turned a deaf ear at the very least or chased him off the stage if he had not chosen his words carefully.   Much the same as if one were to try to convince a group of Islamists or communist party members in the old Soviet Union of the faults of their system of beliefs.

He gives a very good history of how we got here.

Of how up until the 1970s we had a history of increasing worker income in terms of real buying power.

The failure of Hoover and Roosevelt both to stem the depression of the 1930s and that WWII was how we got out of it.

That with the rest of the world in shambles after WWII, business here had it made. But Europe and Japan got rebuilt, American business threw in the towel since they could no compete.

How computers diminished the need for workers and increased immigration and women and minorities in the work force helped for stagnate wages.

How this stagnation in wages couple with increase worker productivity increased profits and how these profits were used to lend money to workers to offset the real wages lost.

This leading to bubbles and collapses and workers become more stressed and household debt has gone through the roof.

And that this current situation will not end of get any better and that re-regulation will not work.  As there will always be a motivation to remove it

And that a fundamental change in the system is necessary, not just here but in the world wide economy and that it’s happening now. Though most are unaware.

The whole presentation is quite good and worth the 60 min it takes to watch.

http://vimeo.com/39903036

untitled - flickr

They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want . . . they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that . . . that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. - George Carlin

Society, or the common good, as Chomsky called it, encourages people to focus on themselves and their own success. Programs such as public education and Social Security, which are now under attack, are based on a different perception. “They are based on the perception that we should care about other people….That’s a dangerous perception. It means you should be a human being and not a pathological creature,”

I was looking to see what new software was available to design printed circuit boards just now. My main criteria was for a package that would easily allow me to use a GUI to design the foot prints of new parts I may come across or old parts I may want to use or even ones I make myself. IE their physical characteristics and how they would fit on the board.  I was not surprised to find than few of the packages even allowed this.  Most relied on libraries of parts that come with the packages or supplied by the part manufacturers.  So I will continue to use the one I have which does allow this even though it is lacking in some other areas. I can get around this.

This seems typical of today that if you want to be out of the mainstream….out of what has been determine as normal, you are at best out of luck.

Homogenized plain vanilla society of robotic programmed thinking and acting and speaking has become more and more institutionalized.   And enforced by the police state as we are seeing. Step out of line and the man come and take you way.

And this brain washing and indoctrination begins in the schools.  This was the main point of Norm Chomsky’s talk.

I was quite fortunate growing up. I was not really pushed in any one direction by either of my parents. Especially not by my mother who raised my brothers, sisters and I after my father passed away.  She was an artist and her temperament and belief was to forge ahead in what every direction ones spirit and interests take. Quite the dichotomy  of public education where one is classed in an either or situation. College bound or not.   Male or female. And even after civil rights, white or not.  And as Malvina Reynolds said in her song, destined for Little Boxes. With the primary focus is on personal gain and consumerism rather than cooperation, common good and concern for one’s fellows. Programmed sociopathy.

A situation that Gui Rochat found so appalling when he arrived here from Europe. What he called “Rational Totalitarianism“  in this essay from Counterpunch.

Even now the socialization process for US children is strictly slanted to bourgeois standards and geared towards security, consumption and materialist competition. It is a yoke not easily shed, which sadly later on often leads to desperation amidst a fulsome artificial happiness. Listening to that what cannot be thought of is lacking, preventing all access to an inner life. Individual materialist isolation unfortunately creates strangulated human souls. Any deviation from this set pattern is discouraged in pre-school children as being anti-social, nerdish and not mentally normal. Those who infamously broke away were those sensitive individuals who shielded themselves by eccentricity, chemical or alcoholic dependency gathering then in enclaves like Big Sur, San Francisco and the  Village and if they could afford it, fled abroad.

Imagination is already silenced in small children when their abundantly produced toys of all description or type pre-empt the eagerly growing mind from wandering beyond the limits of daily reality. Thus isolated from an early age and carefully conditioned to conform to a competitive emptiness, as soon as they are removed from their familiar environment they feel defenseless and out of anxiety react with aggression. This appears daily within the Republic, where threats of unfamiliarity and displacement are counter acted immediately by violent acts and Big Sur was no exception despite its bohemian isolation.

…..snip…..

The definition of totalitarian in Webster is: ‘designating of, or like a government or state in which one political group maintains complete control’. One could well expand this definition from the actual political structure of this Republic to a singular mind pattern that seems to define its people. In fact when a human being is fully dependent on outer rules of behavior and when these are internalized as the sole allowable mode of thinking, the individual’s personality is forced to function at the exclusion of any other potential human reality. Even when eagerly seeking enlightenment from the various gurus that came to ply their trade in California the participants in meditation were hampered by their inability to abandon the commands of their positivist indoctrination.

Capitalist reality is the intense conditioning to prevailing standards of a binary either/or social control, like the twin towers of the former World Trade Center in New York which were fully identical but symbolically signified together the indestructible monopoly of American economic power. Similarly the thoughts of US citizens appear to veer between two alternatives which are equal, like the Republican and Democratic parties, as Twiddle Dum and Twiddle Dee, fragile identical twin white eggs with attitude. Either/or exercises of by rote learned and from an early age on deliberately inculcated modes of thought that operate chiefly by what are erroneously called multiple choices, only signify a cosmetic binary difference. But these binary choices are firmly anchored in the underlying tough monolith of established capitalist values. Imagination is entirely suppressed as it would threaten the status quo of socially approved behavior. It prevents a functioning healthy   democracy because that demands a manifold spectrum of untainted choices in one’s private as well as in one’s social life.

This totalitarianism of binary thinking is what keeps the Republic in business because its various cultural divergences are a strong centrifugal force. However it impoverishes the exploration of different realities and equally of all political discourse. You are either my comrade or my opponent, either complicit in creating profit or a ‘mark’ to be exploited, either a productive or an unproductive person and in all of these cases of fictitious alternatives the protagonists are unhappily tied into an unbreakable mental bondage. The question is how to successfully disrupt these chains of mechanical thought and how to liberate minds from false opposites. So far the totalitarian base for domination remains untouched. Only when the sheer illogicality of the present system becomes exposed by a slow attrition of these prefabricated beliefs can there be any hope for the struggle of what was already expressed in a Swiss revolutionary song of 1810: ”Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten …” (our thoughts are free, who can guess their content ?).

A rather harsh but fairly accurate description, I believe.  Which is why this attack on education and the social safety net.  With universities becoming more and more an indoctrination into a robotic business world and public schools attacked for teaching critical thinking skills. Where people would question our capitalistic system geared only toward the elites. The new philistines as it were.

What is ironic in this case is that these attacks are coming not only from the very rich but also from the bourgeoisie middle class and professionals as well. Those with college educations, which goes to show just how deep this indoctrination has gone.

I was lucky in that I had but a brief encounter with the planned suburban communities of boxes and was free to explore my interests in techie things unhindered, if not guided.   And that I had given up on school as anything but a source of sometimes useful information. This of course made it difficult to fit into “normal society”, most of which I have come to loath.  Free thinkers being the real enemy of such a society as has been shown by Brave New World and THX1138.

But all is not lost or gloom and doom. There are alternative communities and techies exploring new ways to use technology for community benefit.   And learning how to make their own drones to keep an eye on big brother. Which big brother grudgingly admits they have little control over.   People – few at first but more and more – talking more openly about throwing capitalism out the widow and trying something else.  All flying under the radar, as it were. Free thinkers all. Even causing the so called liberals and progressives rancor, as they too have been indoctrinated with the capitalistic myth.

It was the free thinkers that brought us the arts and the technological advances and scientific advances.  Robotic mediocrity only brings stagnation and indifference.

25 Years of Industrial Unionism - flickr

I thought it would be a good idea to bring some history to the self defined liberal and progressives who occasionally come to this here site concerning this country and it’s esteemed past.   For what it’s worth here goes.

The founding fathers were smugglers and pirates and worse. And even Benjamin Franklin called the Tea Party and act of piracy.

By 1705 the tide was already turning against slavery in Great Briton. With the following judgments in British courts.

In Smith v. Gould(1705–07) 2 Salk 666, Holt CJ stated that by

               “the common law no man can have a property in another.”

Lord Henley LC said in Shanley v. Harvey (1763) 2 Eden 126, 127 that as

  “soon as a man sets foot on English ground he is free.”

And abolished entirely by 1837 by act of parliament.    So if we had remained part of GB, slavery would have been ended here long before 1865. Kind of makes you wonder what the real motivations behind our so called revolution really were.

The sinking of the USS Maine – which is still considered by many as suspicious – was the  casus belli for the Spanish American war which netted the US Cuba and Puerto Rico and a number of Caribbean Islands. As well as giving Teddy Roosevelt something to charge up and a big boost to his stature. Also cementing The Monroe Doctrine.  As well as the Roosevelt Corollary which essentially stated that the US could do what ever it damn well pleased on this side of the planet.

Speaking of good old Teddy. He was probably the the first and one of the few real progressives we have ever had in Washington.   A conservationist, pro union,  anti-trust and pure food and drug advocate.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 scared the shit pants out of the capitalists. Especially here and that includes the so called middle class.  It resulted in the first Red Scare and The Palmer Raids.

The year 1919 saw a great deal of social conflict–a wave of strikes, the passage of both Prohibition and Woman Suffrage, and the Chicago race riot. A series of bombings by suspected anarchists began in Summer 1919; on June 2, bombs went off in eight cities, including Washington DC, where Palmer’s home was partially destroyed. Just who set the bombs remained unclear. Although there were only about 70, 000 self professed Communists in the United States in 1919, Palmer viewed them as responsible for a wide range of social ills, including the bombings. Encouraged by Congress, which had refused to seat the duly elected socialist from Wisconsin, Victor Berger, Mitchell began a series of showy and well publicized raids against radicals and leftists. Striking without warning and without warrants, Palmer’s men smashed union offices and the headquarters’ of Communist and Socialist organizations. They concentrated whenever possible on aliens rather than citizens, because aliens had fewer rights. In December of 1919, in their most famous act, Palmer’s agents seized 249 resident aliens. Those seized were placed on board a ship, the Buford, bound for the Soviet Union. Deportees included Emma Goldman, the feminist, anarchist and writer who later recalled the deportation in her autobiography, excerpted here

The “Red Scare” reflected the same anxiety about free speech and obsession with consensus that had characterized the war years. Two documents included here point to the absurdity of some of these fears. In the case of “The Most Brainiest Man,” a Connecticut clothing salesmen was sentenced to sixth months in jail simply for saying Lenin was smart. – The Palmer Raids

By the 1930s The Communist Party had made large inroads with the workers here.

Moreover, the Communist Party had a genuine base among industrial workers, containing within its membership many of the same shop floor leaders from the strikes that built the CIO unions. In 1935, for example, communist membership among auto workers numbered 630, nearly doubling to 1,100 in 1939–with a periphery of sympathizers far bi gger. In 1937, the CP had 28 shop nuclei in the Detroit auto industry, while CP members were active in nearly every major auto workers union local.40

Likewise, CP members played a leading role in some of the key rubber workers strikes which swept through Akron, Ohio in 1936. CP members were part of the Firestone strike committee, while the chief picket captain of the Goodyear strike was a party leader. And the CP’s Akron organizer was asked to address a meeting of all the strike picket captains.41

But another factor also contributed to the Communist Party’s widespread influence among workers. It claimed to be the true inheritor of the tradition of the Bolsheviks, the party that led the Russian working class to power in 1917. That had been true when the CP was formed in 1921, when several revolutionary groups which had left the SP after the Russian Revolution merged together.

When Stalin, who purged the the Trotskyist opposition and original Bolsheviks,  came to power the communist here were to follow Stalinist policies.  This in my opinion was the initial fall of communism and socialism here as Stalin was opposed to socialism.  As Chomsky states.

Since its origins, the Soviet State has attempted to harness the energies of its own population and oppressed people elsewhere in the service of the men who took advantage of the popular ferment in Russia in 1917 to seize State power. One major ideological weapon employed to this end has been the claim that the State managers are leading their own society and the world towards the socialist ideal; an impossibility, as any socialist — surely any serious Marxist — should have understood at once (many did), and a lie of mammoth proportions as history has revealed since the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime. The taskmasters have attempted to gain legitimacy and support by exploiting the aura of socialist ideals and the respect that is rightly accorded them, to conceal their own ritual practice as they destroyed every vestige of socialism.

The middle class was not fond of socialism or any far left policies. So convincing them how bad communism and socialism was turned out to be very easy. McCarthy and Truman had this one in the bag. Besides their new found employment in the defense and/or related industries depended on it.

The capitalist class employs a managerial middle class to keep workers under control. Like the egg that holds oil and water together in mayonnaise, the middle class functions like an emulsifier, binding workers and capitalists in the social arrangement of capitalism.

At work, middle-class managers impose the will of the boss on the workers. In society, the middle class imposes the will of the capitalist class on the working class.

The middle class functions as the loyal lieutenant of capitalism. When working people rebel, the middle class condemns their demands as “unrealistic” and preaches compromise so as not to offend the powers-that-be. [ emphasis mine]

Without the middle class, the other two classes would battle for social control, and the advantage would go to the working class with its superior numbers and its hands on the wheels of production.

As long as the working-class majority does not believe in itself, it will accept the rule of the middle and upper classes. But as soon as that changes, capitalism will be thrown into the air. As the working class takes control of the economy, it will build a completely new society, a socialist society based on real democracy, solidarity and self-determination.

FDR and LBJ had to do what they did to keep the country from blowing up.  People like Huey Long, Henry Wallace, MLK and Malcolm X were becoming far to popular and a threat to the bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie and elites.

What built Silicon Valley and the technology needed for your iPads and iPhones and PCs and brought your parents and grand parents education and financial security – as well as those nice ethnic free suburban neighborhoods – was good old Uncle Sam and the military.  It was the military and their space wing – NASA- that funded the development of the integrated circuit at Fairchild Semiconductor. Needed for missal guidance and  the noon program. One of the ideas being a military base on the moon.  So the elites and corporatists and the bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie IE middle classes were all for paying for protectionism – that is TAXES.

When these people no longer felt their little worlds threatened, their desire for this diminished greatly as did the government funding. So the jobs and manufacturing went where labor was cheap.  One thing that no one has mentioned is that as long as the Soviet Union existed,  all this new technology was marked secret, top secret or cosmic and its manufacture had to be done here.

I have read a number items on the internet stating that Socialism is the enemy of the middle class. If when one is referring to the middle class as those who are managers and engineers and private practice professionals, this is correct.  In fact it’s one of the whole points. To provide service to the masses for the best outcome with the least cost in resources in an equal and equitable manner.

To at least diminish the effects of capitalistic competition and direct the energies toward and improved product rather than a higher personal gain for the provider.  The antithesis of capitalism and its enemy.