I remember once reading an Indian guru, who said that if the water buffalo had a god, it would probably look like a very large water buffalo. He believed that there is only one god, formless and all pervading, but that he/she/it responds to intense worship by taking on the form that most pleases his/her/its devotees depending on their temperament and station in life.

I am beginning to think that the goddess of paranoia pursues a similar strategy: she appears to the crunchy granola/ruccola crowd as global warming and to the deep fried Mars Bar set as black helicopters.

To each of her myriad of devotees she appears in the form most guaranteed to seduce and charm them, but at bottom, there is no paranoia but paranoia and the media is her witness.

I was reminded of an incident from the darkest days of the Second World War, a time with millions of human beings freshly dead, or about to die, with European civilization ground to dust or burned to ashes, when there, deep in his bomb poof bunker, Winston Churchill sent a pudding back to the kitchen, complaining that it had “no theme”.

That, I think is problem with America’s free floating paranoia: like Winnie’s dessert, the paranoia pudding that Americans are collectively pulling, has no “theme”.

Once president Obama did touch briefly on what I do believe is the goddess’s true form.

We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled. That, too, is what sets us apart as a nation. – President Barack Obama

I disagree, I think the opposite is precisely the truth and that is what “sets us apart as a nation”…. And I can prove it with a few simple graphs:

Actually this is exactly what  doesn’t set us apart, here is the entire world’s estimated distribution of wealth:

So as you can see, if anything sets us apart it is that the distribution of wealth in the USA is much more unequal than the world average.

The previous illustrations are examples of what is called the “Champagne Glass Graph”, let’s look at this simple pie-chart to get a clearer idea of what is going on:

Read the rest of this entry →

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates and men decay

Oliver Goldsmith – The Deserted Village

Throughout the Great Recession and the not-so-great recovery, the most commonly discussed measure of misery has been unemployment. But many middle-class and working-class people who are fortunate enough to have work are struggling as well. New York Times

In most situations there is one thing the whole construct depends on or revolves around. I call that thing the “hinge”.

In analysis, finding the hinge is the shortcut to the center of a mass of inchoate information causing its elements to render some coherence.

In action, identifying the hinge is often finding the “fulcrum” with which to move the world and finding it can bring huge rewards with little input of effort.

The world’s latest economic crisis, for example, was brought upon us by very clever people who had discovered that the “hinge” of our financial system was that there was really no meaningful relation between the actual value of assets and what you could charge for them if you transformed them into a gaseous state.

I have been searching for the “hinge” of the absurd impotence of American progressives. Finding it hasn’t been that difficult.

Historically, the left has concerned itself with the suffering and the exploitation of workers. “Workers” being roughly defined as those with nothing to sell but their labor.

The American left has strayed far from that traditional role and has put much more emphasis on issues that only gain importance after the most basic needs of sustenance have been fulfilled. What passes for a left in the USA is obsessed with racial, gender, ecological and identity politics, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a great number of Americans, of all races and all possible sexual preferences, are mercilessly overworked and underpaid. They are being exploited and treated no better than excrement and left to the mercy of right wing demagogues.

The American left appears unable to make any meaningful contact with those who suffer the most from our economic system. It appears unable to unite them, organize them or even create a consciousness among them that transcends questions of class, race or gender.

USDA data released this week shows that the number of Americans receiving food aid from the Supplemental Nutrional Assistance Program (SNAP) hit another all-time high in August. 45.8 million people — almost 15% of the country — were enrolled in the program, which replaced Food Stamps in 2008. This is only a slight increase from July, when 45.3 million Americans were receiving SNAP help — but a massive 31% jump since June 2009, when the National Bureau of Economic Research declared the most recent recession over. Huffington Post

I think that I may have found said hinge contemplating a simple technical phrase that keeps bouncing off my neural walls: “working poor”. The contradiction between working and simultaneously being poor in the world’s richest country.

Here is how Wikipedia defines the term “working poor”:

Working poor is a term used to describe individuals and families who maintain regular employment but remain in relative poverty due to low levels of pay and dependent expenses.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the writer who has probably done more than anyone to put a face on working poverty, has this to say in her book, “Nickel and Dimed“:

When someone works for less pay than she can live on … she has made a great sacrifice for you … The “working poor” … are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone.

The reality is that millions of working Americans, both black and white, men and women, gay and straight, are being treated like shit every day of their lives and being treated like shit plays a greater part in their suffering than their race, gender or sexual preferences.

“Treated like shit”: surely an exaggeration?

Check this from the Guardian:

It was July 2007 and Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia.

Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.

For Potter it was a dreadful realization that healthcare in America had failed millions of poor, sick people and that he, and the industry he worked for, did not care about the human cost of their relentless search for profits. “It was over-powering. It was just more than I could possibly have imagined could be happening in America,”  he told the Observer.

The Canadian National Post newspaper writes:

The U. S. Congress, corrupted by a failure to impose campaign finance reform on special interests, from unions to wealthy entities, appears to be unable to pass laws to provide even a modicum of fair, universal health-care coverage for its populace.

In short: the American left has spent several generations merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, while the band plays requests.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

I remember once reading an Indian guru, who said that if the water buffalo had a god, it would probably look like a very large water buffalo. He believed that there is only one god, formless and all pervading, but that he/she/it responds to intense worship by taking on the form that most pleases his/her/its devotees depending on their temperament and station in life.

I am beginning to think that the goddess of paranoia pursues a similar strategy: she appears to the crunchy granola/ruccola crowd as global warming and to the deep fried Mars Bar set as black helicopters.

The president is too young to have lived the first “Sputnik moment”, but it was one of the turning points of my life and on hearing the word “Sputnik”, the goddess of paranoia walked over my grave.

For any American child alive then who was principally interested in the humanities: art, literature, history, as I was, it was a terrible moment. The Soviet Union, may she rest in peace, put up the first hunk of the endless rubbish that now tirelessly circles our planet, something about the size of a grapefruit that sailed the heavens in earth orbit going “beep, beep, beep”, soon to be followed by an unfortunate dog named Laika, the first warmblooded creature to die out there. From one day to the next, there was a political-ideological science hysteria that prioritized everything that I am not interested in: math, chemistry etc, to the detriment of everything I love. I think it was then that I vowed to myself that I would someday live in Europe, as far away as I could get from such barren, Sputnik induced, philistinism. Without the first “Sputnik moment” I might never have left.

We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled. That, too, is what sets us apart as a nation. – President Barack Obama

I disagree, I think the opposite is precisely the truth and that is what “sets us apart as a nation”…. And I can prove it with a few simple graphs:

Actually this is exactly what  doesn’t set us apart, here is the entire world’s estimated distribution of wealth:

So as you can see, if anything sets us apart it is that the distribution of wealth in the USA is much more unequal than the world average.

The previous illustrations are examples of what is called the “Champagne Glass Graph”, let’s look at this simple pie-chart to get a clearer idea of what is going on.

So if there is one thing the American people are not is a  “family” with “common goals”. One percent of the population controls thirty five percent of the net worth. Twenty percent of the population controls eighty five percent of that wealth. That leaves no less than eighty percent of the population to divide up the remaining fifteen percent of the wealth left over.

This is a reality that Americans don’t face easily. Here is the reality contrasted with what people think that realty is and with what they think that reality should be:

How does that sort of wealth distribution play out in real life? Here is a reading of America’s mood from Pew Research:

The survey finds that a majority of the public (57%) says it is very difficult or difficult to afford things they really want. About the same percentage said this two years ago (55%). And for many Americans, affording basic necessities remains a struggle – 51% say it is difficult to afford health care, 48% say the same about their home heating and electric bills, and 29% say it is difficult to afford food. – Pew Research Center

In the richest country in world nearly thirty percent of the population have trouble earning enough money to eat. Fifty one percent say it is difficult to afford health care and another forty eight percent can’t afford to heat their homes.

Now having read that you wonder how Obama could say the following with a straight face:

We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people

So here is how the paranoia thing works:

The one percent  of the population that controls forty three percent of the financial wealth and the next four percent that controls twenty nine percent, plus those who control the next twenty one percent are justifiably paranoiac thinking what would happen if the eighty percent of the population left with only seven percent of the financial wealth ever woke up and decided to change the percentages around, if only by democratically using income taxes to redistribute that wealth.

So the major cultural, legal and ideological industry of the USA is to keep that eighty percent, the peasantry,  from actually discovering who is making them so miserable and how they do it and then getting together and changing the situation… as has so often happened throughout history. With ninety three percent of America’s money at their disposal there is no lack of funds for the one percenters to do the job.

And that boys and girls explains why so many Americans are worried about Islam and abortion and black helicopters and climate change and transgenic food and whether Barack Obama was born in the USA and polar bears. Anything but the 800 pound gorilla in the room… identifying the fucker and the fuckee.

Paranoia is what “binds us together as one people”… the paranoia of the haves, fearing that the have nots will someday dispossess them and the have nots with whatever paranoia du jour that the media, owned by that one percent, chooses to feed them and that “suits their temperament and station in life”.

 

I think almost all of us, progressive and otherwise, are conscious that we live in a strange and special era. “The best of times and the worst of times”… yada yada; not “evil” like the 1930s, but strange, dysfunctional, unstable, unpredictable and of a sinister syncopation.

How could we define it?

I would define this time we live in as “the end of the post-Cold-War”, the end of one thing, without the new thing being yet apparent..

To understand this concept it helps to be rather old. I was 45 when the Berlin Wall went down in 1989 and the Cold War began when I was four years old. If you are in your twenties or early thirties it would be almost impossible for you really understand or even imagine how the Cold War structured our world and our lives, how all pervasive it was and how much intellectual capital it used up on both sides of the Iron Curtain. How its cold, dead, vapors infuse the way we still see the world. We are still in the process of clearing our heads and dear old reality is coming to our aid.

In the Cold War, ideology became an industry on both sides, a factory system as powerful and layered as the automobile industry, turning out the ideological marketing that goes by the loaded name of propaganda.

Thousands upon thousands, several generations, of the most talented and intellectually gifted communicators gained prestige, comfortable livings, scholarships, tenure and an infinity of perks in this decades long struggle to see who could tell the best and most convincing story. Actual thinking was of course as poorly rewarded as it always had been.

This wall to wall propaganda did have some very positive effects. Certainly the Berlin Wall would not have come down without it and I would submit that on the other hand, without the ubiquitous presence of Soviet propaganda the American Civil Rights Movement would never have succeeded. Jim Crow was America’s Achilles heel in the battle for hearts and minds in the third world. The good and the great of the United States saw that eliminating “colored only” drinking fountains and letting a few more people vote, was a small price to pay to maintain access to the ever growing amount of the world’s raw materials and strategic areas that were falling into the hands of dark skinned peoples. So the endless advertising campaign did have its positive side. The problem for us was not that people in the soviet block believed our propaganda, the problem for us is that we believed our propaganda. By 1990 those on the eastern side of the wall knew that their propaganda was all bullshit, however, we are just beginning to realize that our propaganda was all bullshit too.

Unfettered, capitalism would spread its powerful wings and fly, so our story went, which of course capitalism certainly did… and now it seems to have bashed its brains out like a light-blinded bird crashing into a glass door.

So now we having discovered that just as “real existent socialism” didn’t work, neither does “real existent capitalism”.

So now, having discovered that the last 64 years or so were mostly a mirage, what comes next?

I would submit that becoming fully human is our most urgent task.

Here are a couple of texts that my intuition tells me point out the path to follow:

To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.  William Deresiewicz – New York Times

Humans, comprising the genus Homo, appeared between 1.5 and 2.5 million years ago, a time that roughly coincides with the start of the Pleistocene 1.8 million years ago. Because the Pleistocene ended a mere 12,000 years ago, most human adaptations either newly evolved during the Pleistocene, or were maintained by stabilizing selection during the Pleistocene./ Evolutionary psychology therefore proposes that the majority of human psychological mechanisms are adapted to reproductive problems frequently encountered in Pleistocene environments. In broad terms, these problems include those of growth, development, differentiation, maintenance, mating, parenting, and social relationships. (…) Our ancestors lived in smaller groups, had more cohesive cultures, and had more stable and rich contexts for identity and meaning. (…) Since hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian, the ancestral population may have been egalitarian as well.(…) Since an organism’s adaptations were suited to its ancestral environment, a new and different environment can create a mismatch. (…) One example is the fact that although about 10,000 people are killed with guns in the US annually, whereas spiders and snakes kill only a handful, people nonetheless learn to fear spiders and snakes about as easily as they do a pointed gun, and more easily than an unpointed gun, rabbits or flowers. A potential explanation is that spiders and snakes were a threat to human ancestors throughout the Pleistocene, whereas guns (and rabbits and flowers) were not. There is thus a mismatch between our evolved fear-learning psychology and the modern environment  Evolutionary Psychology – Wikipedia

Things are looking pretty dismal at the moment. The economic situation is the worst in my lifetime, and I was born at the end of WWII.  The bad news comes fast and furious.

When I am subjected to an information overload, I occasionally experience some sort of intuitive flash connected to images, a sudden understanding/epiphany/gestalt.

The other day the Tea Party movement revealed itself to me in a poetic metaphor that put them into a different perspective. Something that although just as grotesque, is at the same time touchingly human in its vulnerability. Read the rest of this entry →

I am recently arrived here at FDL and thus in the process of introducing myself, so I thought that some new readers might appreciate a little context to see exactly what I mean when I emphasize the importance of the OWS movement.

I consider this highly original political phenomenon,  in essence, as an awakening or “satori” of the American people. I believe it is an American political, social, ethical, moral and one by one personal, awakening from what seemed to me a sort of drug induced slumber of Jacksonian (Michael not Andrew) proportions. With a view to providing that context I am re-posting something I wrote on October 18th 2010. Re-reading it, I find the lineaments of its sinister implications are even more visible now than when I wrote it.  David Seaton

Hope where there was cynicism; solidarity where there had been suspicion. The occupations are more effective as a launch pad than a destination. Nobody knows where this is going. It’s just great to be on the move. Gary Younge – The Guardian

Winter is coming and the bitter cold of the island of Manhattan and the NYPD may finally empty Zuccotti park. What has been accomplished by the occupation of Wall Street?

Some people would say little or nothing.

They are totally wrong. Read the rest of this entry →

Many people are making facile comparisons between today’s OWS movement and the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era. A major difference between what happened then and what is happening today is that the 60′s anti-war movement occurred in the context of great prosperity and full employment, was led by middle class students anxious to avoid the draft, was not seconded by labor and  in the context of a foreign war was often opposed by the “silent majority” on patriotic grounds.

None of this applies today. Now we are seeing students, organized labor and even war veterans arm in arm lined up against the “one percent” and it is also significant that they are ignoring Washington and concentrating their actions directly on the economic powers themselves, occupying Wall Street and now paralyzing America’s most important sea port, Oakland California.

In other places and other eras, both these actions would have been considered pre-revolutionary. Read the rest of this entry →

I wrote this back in February of 2010… It still works for me, so I’d like to share it with you here at FDL. DS

No matter how sympathetic we are with their struggle, most of us following the events in Egypt probably see it as something very foreign: an exotically attired, dark skinned people, speaking heavily accented English in a far off land, rebelling against the corrupt regime of an aging dictator, something to which we can only identify with by an intensely imaginative use of our powers of empathy, seeing few similarities with our own lives and condition. Wrong. Thomas Friedman, of all people, brought it all closer to home for me.

I am no a fan of Friedman’s, but the insight he gave me today was worth reading through a ton of his previous twaddle: “young people rebelling against a regime that has stifled all channels for their upward mobility” and “a system in which a few people have gotten fantastically rich, in giant villas, and everyone else has stagnated”, sounded disturbingly familiar to me. It reminded me of many developed countries, but especially the USA. Reading further in the same online edition of the New York Times, I came upon the next quote by a Chicago labor lawyer, Thomas Geoghegan, “We have an inequality index that can go head to head with Egypt’s. Of course food’s cheaper here, so no one’s in the streets.” Suddenly Cairo seemed much closer to home.

There is one of those wonderful Spanish sayings which goes, “when you see your neighbor’s beard on fire, put your whiskers to soak”. The domestic peace of the the “world’s greatest democracy” could be hanging on the price of America’s food and gasoline.    I was also struck by another common factor, the similar declining value of a university education:  all these revolts began when a Tunisian university graduate, unable to find work in any profession in consonance with his education and forced to earn his living peddling vegetables from an illegal pushcart, set himself on fire in protest.  His suicide struck a chord in the entire Arab world and maybe, deep down, farther afield as well.

In a globalized economy, everyone is exposed to the same general forces.  We are ruled by the “butterfly effect“, and the butterflies are flapping their little hearts out all over the world today. Some countries and some people are much more vulnerable than others and that makes them more immediately and visibly victims to the forces that are also bending millions of people’s lives more subtly and more gradually out of shape in more powerful, richer and more dynamic economies.

With every day that passes it seems clearer to me that growing social and economic inequality is the most dangerous wild card in the world’s deck and that within a decade, or perhaps much less, what is happening in Egypt today will be seen as more than the beginning of a revolution in the Arab world,or in dictatorships, but a harbinger of even wider disturbances in places you might least suspect.

Cross Posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com