Of Sheep Dogs, Werewolves and Dog Whistles

(Note: this post is something I have intended to write for the last several weeks. Today Dmitry Orlov of Cluborlov stole some of my thunder, but that's okay. I had left a few comments on some recent posts on his blog, and he responded with a brilliant, succint post that states some points that should be obvious to an intelligent person. I'll say what I'm going to say anyhow, but please read his latest post as well. He says it better than I could.)

I hate election years in this country. From 2000 onward, I've begun to hate them, and my hatred of them has only increased with the passing of time. There are two objects of my hatred: first, candidates who genuinely scare me to death, and second, the scary fans and followers of these candidates.

I have to admit something: in 2000 I was still a card-carrying Republican. (I'm sorry for that; all I can say is that I had drunk a lot of Kool-Aid.) By 2005, the Kool-Aid had largely worn off. In 2006 I quit the Republican party. In 2007 I first heard about Peak Oil and the other resource constraints facing our society.

For a rather brief time in 2007, I thought that it might be possible to induce governments in the United States at all levels to create policies that would help our society to gracefully deal with resource depletion and mitigate the environmental damage caused by our way of life. But by the end of 2007, I gave up that hope.

I distrusted Obama at first, believing that there was just a bunch of sloganeering and not much substance to the man. But the Democratic primaries were so vicious that I thought that there might be something to the man after all, for his chief rival to attack him so viciously. Then he won the Democratic nomination and began to back off from some of the positions he had espoused – such as a swift end to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – and I lost hope again. The only reason I voted for him – or even argued in his behalf – was that his opponents, McCain and Palin, were acting like serial murderer schizophrenics who had lost their meds.

Obama won, of course, and from that time to this, the American Right has waged a tireless campaign to discredit and oust him. The energy, vehemence and enthusiasm of that campaign is something that hasn't been seen in American politics for a long time. Even when Bill Clinton was president, there was not so much energy put into removing him as there is being directed toward removing Obama. This is so even though Obama has done pretty much everything his corporate masters wanted. I believe that one can trace an unbroken trajectory of presidential policy all the way from Reagan through the first Bush and Clinton and the second Bush to Obama. That is because the Presidency, the Supreme Court and both houses of Congress have been captured by the very wealthy. No matter who wins this year, that presidential policy will remain the same. And most people would admit this, if they were willing to be honest with themselves.

So why the right-wing hatred of Obama? To me it's a case of dog whistle politics, plain and simple. No one in political power wants to admit it, but we still have a race problem in the United States. It exists, just below the surface of many conversations about the future of our country. And let's be blunt: the race problem now consists of a great deal of angst and anger among certain Americans over the fact that a.) a Black man was able to become President, b.) White America is losing its hegemony and preeminence in the world, and c.) immigrants (many of whom are dark-skinned) are carving out a happy life for themselves in our country.

The current crop of Republican presidential candidates are all – to a man – playing on this angst and anger in order to get elected. Yet the angst and anger are both unrealistic and immoral. So America is losing its preeminence. So the world is becoming a much bigger place. So “we” are all going to have to learn to share with each other. Is that the end of the world? Deal with it and move on. In the process of learning to live harmoniously with others, many Americans might actually become better people. But no, that is unacceptable to a nation whose vice president once said that the American way of life is non-negotiable. “We can't be happy unless we have everything, and unless everyone else is either enslaved by us or wiped out by us! Support our troops!”

So what about the sheep-dogs? Well, over the last several years, many wealthy people have spent vast sums of money trying to fashion public opinion in this country to suit their interests. The efforts of Fox News and other media outlets have been bent toward creating a right-wing culture of intolerant selfishness in this country, in order to legitimize the wealthy and the government policies fashioned in recent years to increase the power and wealth of the wealthy. The Obama presidency wasn't supposed to happen, and I think it caught these folks by surprise. So they manufactured astroturf populist movements like the Tea Party in order to get their lackeys elected.

The funny thing is that the policies enacted by these lackeys did not just target people of color or immigrants. Rather, they had the effect of bleeding the entire “middle class/working class” to death. They were like a broad-spectrum antibiotic in that regard. An increasing number of people began to suffer, including working-class Republicans and former supporters of the Tea Party. (How ironic!) The media mouthpieces were quick to blame the suffering on “the Gummint” and “the evil Obama,” but that tactic stopped working after the 2010 elections, in which a lot of Tea Party candidates were elected to governorships, state houses and the U.S. Congress, and instantly began a cannibal feast of gutting the remnants of the “middle class/working class.” (Why the quotation marks? Because the terms “middle class” and “working class” are artificial distinctions created in order to keep us alienated from one another. Nowadays, most of us are merely different shades of “poor.”)

In response, the Occupy movement sprang up spontaneously, both in the United States and in many English-speaking countries. It was genuine, bona fide populism and not astroturf, and it too was something that was not supposed to happen. It took the wealthy by surprise.

The initial media response to the Occupy movement was either to ignore it, to marginalize it or to criticize it. However, it soon became apparent to those who actually run our country that the Occupy movement was too popular to ignore, to crush or to sweep under the rug. Hence “sheep dogs” were employed in order to turn public anger over exploitation by the wealthy into harmless directions. The usual sheep dogs were employed – so-called “progressive” radio and television personalities like Rachel Maddow and “progressive” radio stations like KPOJ, as well as Democratic politicians. But these were joined by a rather unlikely cast of sheep dog “extras” on the Right. It is rumored that even Glenn Beck tried to cast himself as sympathetic to some of the grievances of the Occupiers.

By far, one of the smoothest and suavest sheep dogs has been Ron Paul, the congressman with big ears from Texas who has tried for years to cast himself as an “outsider” who is opposed to corporate power and corporate influence in politics. It seems that Mr. Paul has picked up the endorsements of a few old, toothless ex-counterculture figures like Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Noam Chomsky. Ron Paul has sided with many who warn of America's imminent collapse. Ron Paul has denounced American militarism. And Ron Paul has even praised the Occupy movement. He sounds like the real deal, doesn't he?

Except he isn't. Not to me. Part of the problem is that I'm a black man. Ron Paul has denounced Abraham Lincoln for waging the Civil War and ending slavery. Ron Paul has denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act that, among other things, ended racial discrimination in schooling, employment and voting. Ron Paul has stated that while he believe discrimination is wrong, he doesn't believe the Government should prevent it. (Rather like a fire chief who says that while he believes that house fires are terrible, he doesn't believe that the fire department should put out fires.) Ron Paul ran an organization that for years published newsletters that made outrageously racist claims about people of color. At times, when questioned about these letters, he has denied having any control over their content. That's about as plausible as saying to someone, “I didn't realize that my fist was trying to punch your face. A body is a complicated thing to control, you know.”

But another part of the problem is that no matter my color, I'm part of the 99 percent. And Ron Paul's libertarianism is no comfort to me. One of the things governments are supposed to do is to protect the weak from the strong. This includes not only ethnic minorities, but also people without wealth, as well as the ecosystems on which we all depend. Protecting the weak from the strong reduces the total loot available to the strong, so the strong (in this case, the very wealthy) have systematically both weakened and bought off our government to serve their interests.

The strong are using their media mouthpieces to amplify the distaste many of us without strength feel toward a government that no longer protects us. The message of the strong is, "See, you all are suffering because you rely on a government at all!" The truth is that we all are suffering because the strong have broken the government we had. The aim of some of the strong is to abolish the government entirely. That will leave the weak with no protection against the strong.

And that is my problem with Mr. Paul. Ron Paul is a werewolf.

No One For President, Or, Election-Proofing Your Life

(Before I start, I'd like to welcome Meg O'Halloran to my blog. Thanks for your readership! Also, a belated welcome to those who joined last year, including Neil and Naomi Montacre. If you live in the Portland metro area, feel free to check out their store some time.)

I've been thinking about my visit to the #Occupy Portland protests, especially in light of the mainstream media's continued lame coverage of the #Occupy movement in general. While the MSM have not been exactly enthusiastic or even diligent in their coverage of the protests, they have been very enthusiastic in providing coverage of the Republican presidential campaign. This is interesting in that it shows the rapidly widening rift between the MSM and the ordinary people of the United States.

One message that came through loud and clear in my interviews with the #Occupy Portland protesters is that increasingly, most Americans do not believe that either main political party serves the interests of the common people. Increasingly, people are coming to believe that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are actually interested in providing solutions or adaptive responses to the problems and predicaments facing ordinary Americans in this time of economic decline and contraction. An increasing number of Americans is waking up to the realization that the entire electoral and political process has been bought by the rich in order to serve the rich at the expense of all the rest of us. And more and more Americans are realizing that the story they are being fed by the mainstream media bears no resemblance to reality – especially the reality lived daily by ordinary people of small means.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is pushing stories about Texas Governor Rick Perry's proposed policies for America while Herman Cain chews up the airwaves with controversial and schizophrenic statements. (If ever there was a man suffering from a massive case of Stockholm syndrome, Herman Cain fits the bill. He's at least as bad as Clarence Thomas.) And AOL News recently ran a piece advising its readers which Republican presidential candidate would be best for their wallets. At least Sarah Palin has experienced a rare moment of decency and has decided not to run for president.

Increasingly, the Republicans remind me of a line from a Warren Zevon song, Werewolves of London: “You better stay away from him. He'll rip your lungs out, Jim...” And the Democrats? They are being paid by the werewolves to do nothing while the rest of us get eaten. In fact, I can see a few well-developed canine teeth in the mouths of many Democrat politicians. As for third parties in the United States, most of them also seem to be insane and more than a little bit feral.

Maybe we ordinary people should send an election year message of our own to whoever might be listening. I propose a campaign consisting of homemade bumper stickers (for those who drive) or bicycle helmet stickers (for those who pedal). Let the stickers read, NO ONE FOR PRESIDENT. I also propose that ordinary working-class people devise means for election-proofing their lives. This means finding strategies that will enable you to live in some measure of dignity without danger to your lungs or any other body parts, no matter which werewolf gets elected in 2012.

P.S. I will have a couple of more technical posts in the next few weeks, including (hopefully) an interview.

Laser Bigotry

I'll start this post with an illustration.

Lasers are interesting devices. The word “laser” is actually an acronym formed from the first letters of the words “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.” Lasers work as follows: a “lasing” material (either a special crystal or gas or semiconducting material) is “pumped” with electromagnetic energy. This energy raises the electrons in the atoms of the material to higher “orbits” as the electrons store the energy pumped into the material. Then as electrons start to give up this energy and fall back to lower energy states, the energy is released as photons (light), which strike other atoms in the material, causing them to give up their pumped energy as well, ultimately resulting in a cascading flood of photons which comprise the light of the resulting laser beam. The laser beam has some unusual characteristics, which make it both interesting and useful. First, the light of the beam is monochromatic; that is, it is composed of light of one color only. Second, the beam is coherent; that is, it does not spread out except over very great distances. The light of the laser beam is the result of a series of deliberate choices by the designers and makers of lasers, as laser light is almost never found in nature.

Which brings me to the Arizona shootings this weekend, and to further reflections on American social life in these troubled times. There are many who write and comment on the societal consequences of resource depletion and economic collapse, and who state their belief that such times promote the rise of fascism, bigotry and intolerance. The way these writers talk, however, makes it sound as if adverse conditions cause fascism, bigotry and intolerance to just bubble up from the body politic in some inexplicable way that can only be described as a mysterious social force untraceable to any one individual.

I think such an explanation is nonsense. There are, to be sure, many idiots, bigots, and all-around doofuses in the United States these days. Our American society is now faced with post-Peak Oil, the depletion of a host of other resources, an economy which is long since past its peak, an environment which is increasingly degraded to such an extent that it can no longer support life, and the decline of our influence and hegemony in the world. Even within the U.S., the dominant Anglo sons and daughters of privilege are finding that they must now function within a multipolar, multicultural society. They have been used to being the sole center of attention for too long. For too long, they have been overloaded with all the toys a kid could want, and they have not had to share with anyone else. Our post-Peak nation in a post-Peak world will be forced to learn to share. This is a cause of angst and resentment among some of the sons and daughters of privilege.

Given the right environment, this angst and resentment could be constructively worked out. After all, having to share is not the end of the world. On a purely physical, technical level, it is quite possible that we could all live securely in a managed contraction of our economy, with high quality of life, if we were simply willing to share what we have with each other. But ours is not the right environment.

The present social environment of mainstream America is the deliberate product of its makers and designers, who are the wealthiest of the sons and daughters of privilege. They would rather tear this country apart than share the mountains of things they have piled up to themselves via the impoverishment of the rest of the nation and the world. They own the majority of the media and the majority of its politicians and most prominent mouthpieces.

So we have Fox TV and Fox News telling us that the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 arose because banks were forced to lend to minorities. We have Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh making all kinds of bigoted, racist statements to the world. We have Fox News agitating for war in Iraq even though the war was unjustified. We have all the Fox talking heads calling Obama a closet Muslim, a terrorist and a Nazi, even though their accusations had no basis in fact. We have Steve Forbes and Dick Armey creating the “Tea Party” and we have nearly all mainstream American media focusing an inordinate amount of attention on the Tea Baggers while ignoring genuine grassroots expressions of public opinion that run counter to the “me first” message of the Tea Baggers. We have Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes now able to vomit their hatred through thousands of mouthpieces. We have the Arizona immigration law and Republicans poised to try to push similar laws in several other states. We have the primary school textbook industry now taken over by right wing zealots who want to use public schools to push their jingoist propaganda. We have places like Walmart and Fred Meyer hawking books by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and George Bush – right next to the newsstands carrying Star, the National Enquirer and Cosmopolitan. And we have Sarah Palin targeting her opponents in the crosshairs.

Under such a media onslaught, it's not surprising that a few narrow-minded working-class redneck types would find themselves getting “lased.” Like atoms being pumped by light of a certain frequency, these people are gladly allowing themselves to get pumped by propaganda that validates their evil beliefs and desires. Is it any wonder that when they release their “pumping energy”, the result is violently destructive deeds?

To be sure, there is now a “debate” in the mainstream media over whether the right-wing garbage now emanating from most American media mouthpieces is actually responsible for the appearance of white supremacist militias and acts of violence such as the Arizona shootings. According to the McClatchy Tribune, a professor from USC “cautioned against coming to any conclusions about the motivations of the shooter in Tucson.” Similar backpedaling can be seen from Fox TV and Sarah Palin. And one person wrote, “Leave it to the liberals to expect one person to be held accountable for the individual actions of every person who hears them. It's representative of the liberal nanny state dream come true!”

Funny thing, though, is that a couple of decades ago, when these very same right-wingers were religiously campaigning against indecency on television, their opponents tried to deny any causal link between indecency in the media and sexual activity among young watchers of TV and movies. Now the right wingers are trying to use the same defense. Ah, well, to borrow a line from the Crucible, “God damns (punishes) all liars.” (By the way, the Good Book says something similar in Revelation 22:15.)

An Election Eve "Amen"

Update - 24 November 2023: Having examined the writings and worldview of many members of the Peak Oil/Collapse crowd which flourished from the middle of the first decade of the 21st century until 2016, I find that I must withdraw my agreement with many of the statements made by these people.  First, they all tended to predict that a zombie apocalypse was right around the corner - in many cases, only months away.  Ran Prieur (cited below) was one such writer.  Obviously, the zombie apocalypse has not come, and is not likely to be triggered by the decline of worldwide petroleum production.  As anyone can see, the use of renewable sources of electric energy has greatly expanded, with the result that prices of transportation fuel have begun to fall - even though supply remains tight.

The other problem with the prepper/collapse crowd is that so many of these people have turned out to be aligned with the Global Far Right and the aspirations of people such as Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.  One of the tactics of choice in which these people have engaged over the years is to try to convince us that in the United States, there is almost no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans as political agents.  While I'd be the first to admit that the Democratic Party is guilty of many failings, I am absolutely certain that the Democratic Party is not trying to create an American autocracy under a leader who is a criminal and malignant narcissist.  I also know that the Democratic Party is not threatening to build concentration camps in order to lock up immigrants and political prisoners on American soil.  And I know that the Democratic Party is not trying to bring back the days in which Mexican migrant children were forcibly ripped away from their parents and thrown into detention centers by U.S. Border Patrol agents.  In other words, I do not see the Democratic Party as the agent of an attempted revival and expansion of white supremacy.  On the other hand, the Republicans are guilty of all these things.  So I am retracting my original words written for this post.  The retracted words are indicated by strikeout text.  If I find any other posts which contain words which could potentially be seized upon and misused by the Global Far Right, I will post this disclaimer and retraction in those posts also.

I'm grading papers this weekend, so I may not have time for any kind of lengthy post. (I can't wait to get my life back to myself again!) But in taking a short break from grading (also known as goofing off), I came across a priceless gem from the website of Ran Prieur. Mr. Prieur is among the writers and thinkers whose work I read from time to time, although I must say that I don't agree with everything he says. (Some days, I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.)

I did, however, greatly enjoy the following quote:

"So we have an American election in a few days. A common argument against voting is that it trains you to think that working within the system is the best or only way to make a better world. My answer is: could you set the bar for yourself any lower? That's like not watching any commercials because then you won't be able to stop yourself from buying the product. If you don't think you can vote while keeping a healthy mental distance, now would be an excellent time to learn. Your vote is not a precious flower to be given only to the one you love; it is a cold tactical decision, and collectively, it does make a difference.

"You are in a giant building that's on fire. The Democratic party is saying, 'Yes, there was a small fire, but it's mostly under control now. We spent eleven cents on squirt guns and a trillion dollars building some higher floors. Remain calm and go about your business.'

"The Republican party is saying, 'You are in a giant building that's on FIRE! Those people are to blame, and those people, and those people! KILL them! Kill them ALL!! And to put out the fire, we will use gasoline, and white phosphorus! YEEEEEE-HAAAAAAA!!!!'

"Now, if you are trying to get safely out of the building, who would you rather have in charge?"

Amen.

In All Fairness To Barack Obama...

Some of them knew pleasure, and some of them knew pain,

and for some of them it was only the moment that mattered.

And on the brave and crazy wings of youth, they went flyin' around in the rain

and their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered.

And in the end, they traded their tired wings

for the resignation that living brings

and exchanged love's bright and fragile glow

for the glitter and the rouge.

And in a moment they were swept...

before the deluge.

– Jackson Browne, Before The Deluge

The President of the United States has been the subject of some (seemingly) searching media examination lately. Both Time and Newsweek magazines have featured articles describing Obama as a stymied president facing challenges that may well be insurmountable. Even our own newspaper, the Oregonian, jumped in with their own two cents' worth.

Opinion in the street has not been altogether favorable to Obama lately. I remember how I had misgivings about him even as I voted for him, and even as I defended him in conversations with some of my acquaintances who were true believers in Fox News, the National Enquirer, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. This last Christmas, a relative (who believes to this day that Obama is a Muslim) asked me again what I thought of him (this question was related to health care “reform”). When I said, “I think he's a liar,” you should have seen the look of triumph in my relative's eyes. That look of triumph made me angry, however, as I didn't want to have to go into a fact-based defense of my statement in the presence of someone who feeds on professionally-spun rumors.

Me, I think it's time to give Mr. Obama a bit of a break – but not too much of a break, because, unfortunately, I still have to be truthful. So let's talk a bit about the challenges facing this President of the United States at such a dark time for the nation and for the world, and some missteps that could have been avoided.

In all fairness to Barack Obama, the mess into which he stepped by becoming President is not a mess of his own making. Many of the trends which comprise this present mess began before a lot of us were born – including Obama. Free-market predatory economist Milton Friedman had already hit his stride by the time Obama came into the world. The liabilities of our present industrial society were only beginning to be discussed in the 1970's – a time in which Obama was just turning from a kid to a teenager, learning to shave and to drive. The arrangements of empire by which Europe and the United States exploited the rest of the world have been decades in the making.

The politicians whose rise to power facilitated America's state of denial about limits to growth entered office while he was still a college student. I think particularly of Ronald Reagan, who was aided and abetted by his friend across the Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher. Obama was far from the centers of power that gave us Reagan, Bush the First, and Bill Clinton, and was thus not in much of a position to do anything about them.

By the time Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate, America and its leaders had already begun to decline. Our manufacturing had largely been outsourced, our technical work was beginning to be outsourced, our main exports were starting to consist of “financial products” instead of real goods, the gains of the Civil Rights Movement were being quietly reversed, we were already fighting wars of hegemony (such as Bill Clinton's invasion of Haiti), the rich were claiming an ever-larger share of the nation's wealth and were in fact running the country while the rest of us were being trained to “aspire” to ever more lavish lifestyles, even though we were getting poorer, our resource base had long since started declining and we were having to buy more and more things on credit. By the time Obama became a U.S. Senator, the country had become mired in an unjust war of conquest in Iraq, and our collective debt was already becoming unsustainable. This was all taking place against the backdrop of the end of cheap oil and the resulting stresses on the American society and economy, and the first real beginnings of the derangement of our planet's climate. Anyone who became President in 2008 would have had one huge mess to clean up.

But in all fairness to Barack Obama, (and by “fairness,” I mean telling it like it is), I have to say that many of us who voted for him in 2008 did so because we realized that the U.S. and the First World were facing limits to our way of life – limits so profound that they would require a total change of our way of life. We clearly saw the problems we were facing – resource depletion; the decline of our “prosperity”; the blood on our collective hands and the unwillingness of other, poorer nations to allow themselves to keep getting jacked in order to keep America fat, dumb and happy; the destruction of the environment due to our excessive consumption and industrial activity.

We correctly identified these all, not as mere “problems” that could be solved by technology or trickery, but as a predicament to be gracefully accepted and endured. And we looked at Bush, McCain and Palin, and the Fox News/neocon/neoliberal crowd as children who were refusing to acknowledge reality. We saw in Obama the possibility of an adult who would speak the truth, who would tell us, “We're not going to return to the glory days of unending prosperity. It's not right that we should want to. We're in for a difficult time. Let's learn to gracefully adapt to it; I'm here to help you and to lead by example.”

Instead, he lied to us.

Just like all the Presidents from Reagan onward. And he proved to be a stooge of the rich, just like the members of the other branches of the U.S. Government and all the major political parties. Which is why there are American troops still in Iraq, there are American troops in Haiti and Colombia and the African continent and Afghanistan and Kyrgystan and Kazakhstan, there are still torture bases in Guantanamo and elsewhere, and any country that has things we want is bound, sooner or later to be described in our media as a “terrorist threat.” Oh, and the rich (especially those on Wall Street) are still getting bailed out by the Federal Government, and the “official” unemployment rate is still below 11 percent, but real unemployment is much higher. And atmospheric CO2 is at nearly 390 parts per million and 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record, globally.

And yet, in all fairness to Barack Obama, he only told us the lie that most of us wanted to hear. It's the lie being told by every major American political figure, as well as their media mouthpieces – even though the finer details of that lie differ from liar to liar (and they fight convincingly over those minor details). It's the lie that our present troubles are “solvable” in a way that would return America to prosperity or “keep America strong!” without forcing any fundamental change in our way of life.

I am thinking just now of some conversations I've been having with people who identify themselves as conservative or sympathetic to groups like the Tea Party, who get their news and views from Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Some of these people even claim to be "well-informed." Yet they all cling rabidly to the promise held out by ultraconservative American politicians and organizers that say, “Support us, because we have The Solution. You don't have to give up your way of life. The threat to our American Way comes from them liberals and illegals and dark-skinned people and foreigners and socialists and scroungers and 'terrrists' who hate our freedoms! If we just get rid of these people, we can have prosperity forever!” In the event that these people actually seized political power in this country, they'd simply install their own liar as spokesman to tell them the kind of stories that are about to be swiftly be disproved by reality.

But the so-called American “Left” is just as much to blame in talking about clean coal, carbon capture, the promise of renewable energy and unbridled faith in the power of technology to grant us unending prosperity. I think of a guy I know... (But then, I'm trying to stop talking widely about these things around some people. Talking just makes me a bit of a pest, not to mention making me mad. Maybe I should duct tape my mouth shut.) Anyway, this guy regularly listens to KPOJ, “Portland's only progressive talk station,” where he regularly hears that the reason the economy is falling apart, the ecosystem is dying and people are jobless is because of the greedy Republicans, and that somehow a better system run by Democrats would solve all problems while guaranteeing prosperity for everyone.

It is true that many of our problems are being exacerbated by greedy rich people in places of power. But the underlying problems would still have to be faced by all of us anyway. Whenever I mention resource depletion and the resulting inevitability of the decline of the industrial economy, this guy's eyes glaze over.

So Obama's a symptom of a larger problem. We want to be lied to. We are facing a predicament, but we want to be told that it's merely a problem, a solvable problem – so we can continue driving our Escalades and Suburbans and Explorers and Yukons and Expeditions and monster trucks, so we can continue aspiring to be rich and living gluttonous and materialistic lives without thinking that such lifestyles must soon end. No matter who was President, we'd have quickly turned him into a liar. And it would soon have become obvious that he could not keep his promise to "solve" our problems.

False Flag Football?

This blog is, among other things, supposed to be a diary. This post is part diary, part commentary on recent events.

A number of writers have asserted that the recent attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound jetliner by a Nigerian man was a “false flag operation,” that is, an operation executed by agents of the U.S. government posing as agents of another country or of an organization in another country, in order to arouse public opinion in support of military action against another country. Immediately some will see this accusation and start saying “Tinfoil hat!” and “Conspiracy nuts!” But those who make the “false flag” accusation have some good points: first, the bumbling incompetency of the so-called “terrorist”; second, the fact that he immediately announced that he was from Al-Qaeda; and thirdly, the implausible string of breakdowns in security that allowed the man to board the jetliner in the first place.

Also in the news are recent allegations by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency that “rebels in Colombia have forged an 'unholy' drug alliance‎” with Al-Qaeda in order to smuggle drugs to the U.S. from Colombia via Venezuela and west Africa. According to the DEA, fiberglass submarines are being loaded with drugs and launched from Venezuela to travel to West Africa, where their cargoes are smuggled by Al-Qaeda to the U.S. This accusation has generated a counter-accusation from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez that the United States is engaging in false flag operations against his country in order to justify destabilizing it.

Whether you believe the accusations regarding false flags or not, one thing is sure. An increasing number of observers of events are becoming increasingly skeptical of the motives and pronouncements of the U.S. Government and of the mainstream media who are its mouthpiece. Our problem is that we've been spectacularly lied to before, and no one in power has really, truly come clean about the truth. We therefore look to places declared “trouble spots” by the government and the media, and we start asking, “What natural resources or geopolitical advantage is the government really trying to get in those places?” Color us cynical, but then again, once a man's wife has caught him cheating on her, it gets very hard for him to convince her afterward that he's home late because he had to work overtime.

More Commentary On The Nigerian “Terrorist”:

• “Why Wasn't Nigerian Subjected to Full Body Search? | Tikun Olam”

• “Is the Detroit Nigerian "Terrorist" A Patsy?”

• “Nigerian terrorist helps introducing Patriot Act 3.0 - Madsen – RT”

• “Questions mount over attempt to bomb Detroit-bound jetliner”

Ayn Rand Is Not My Girlfriend!

Now that I've got your attention, let me tell you why (and why I even bring up this subject in the first place). It's not just that she was born long before my grandparents started dating, nor that she's been deceased for over two decades. But it's that even if we were contemporaries, I, with my present views and convictions, could not possibly be a husband, soulmate or lover of a person with her views and convictions – at least as they are represented by sources like Wikipedia or the Ayn Rand Institute and its magazine, The Objective Standard. (Check out their magazine's article on why usury is supposedly “good” – http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2007-fall/morality-of-moneylending.asp.)

According to Wikipedia, Rand's political views emphasized individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and the the constitutional protection of the right to life, liberty and property. She was also a fierce opponent of all forms of collectivism. These convictions are neatly summed up in a quote from John Galt, the fictional hero in Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.” I have not yet read Atlas Shrugged, but it appears from the summaries I've read that her novel was an elevation of the rich early 20^th-century industrialists to hero status, and an attack on all those who would place limits on the power and reach of such industrialists. At her funeral (attended by Alan Greenspan among others), a six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket. This seems only fitting, as her convictions seemed to condone the massive aggregation of capital into the hands of a select few, by any means including influencing governments to legalize any strategies used by this select few in their pursuit of capital.

Ayn Rand's writings are a living embodiment of selfishness. Anyone who has been reading my blog for any time knows that I believe that selfishness – among the rich and powerful first, and among the rest of us to whom they taught it – is at the root of the problems we now face in our modern global society. The practice of that selfishness has brought our society to the brink of collapse. I believe that this selfishness lies, in some Freudian/subconscious way, at the root of the present opposition voiced by many on the political and religious Right to real and effective solutions to global climate change, habitat destruction, Peak Oil and economic collapse. Or then again, maybe those who oppose real solutions know full well why they oppose them, yet they suppress the full realization or stating of their reasons, so that they never have to face them. I'll deal with the Religious Right in an upcoming post on my other blog, From SoC to Points North. But for now, I'd like to make a few observations about the right wing in general.

The right wing is full of people who preach that government should be as small as possible, that any government regulation of business is unjust and “socialist,” and that the way to economic prosperity for nations is an utterly “free” market. Some of these people may have read my recent post titled, “Knee-Capping the Peasants,” and may have found that this post resonated with them. They may think that they have found a true brother-in-arms in me, a true ideological soul-mate who thinks that all government is evil. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A society of unrestrained freedom, where government either has no power or exists solely to protect property rights, can work only as long as its citizens are sinlessly perfect. Sinlessly perfect people don't violate each other's rights intentionally, nor do they live for greed. They may make mistakes through inexperience, yet once they are educated in the proper way to relate to their neighbors, they need no coercion to walk in that proper way.

The problem is that ours is a world full of sinners. It's not that what we do makes us sinners; it's that what we do proves that we are sinners. “Everyone is crooked deep down,” as a songwriter once wrote. That means that every one of us is capable of being deliberately hurtful to others. Many of the laws of human societies are not an expression of our virtue, but an admission of our disease – they are enacted and enforced out of self-interest, in order to protect us from each other when we are at our worst moments, so that we can live, breathe and sleep in some semblance of peace.

Merely educating people in responsible behavior is thus not enough to keep us from hurting each other, especially as technology has placed tools of increasing power and danger in the hands of larger and larger numbers of people. Here are a few examples: I went to a concert once where kids were shining laser pointers into the eyes of the musicians onstage. This was even though the laser pointers had clearly marked warnings about retinal damage and the danger of laser light. Another example: most states require drivers to stop at crosswalks to allow pedestrians to cross. This is especially true if one is making a right turn through a crosswalk and a pedestrian has the “Walk” signal. Yet recently I have seen murderously impatient idiots with Oregon license plates (who thus must have passed an Oregon driving test) blowing through clearly-marked crosswalks with “Yield to Pedestrians” signs while pedestrians were trying to cross. Also, I don't know of any state where motorists are allowed to cross the double yellow lines on a two-lane road, yet I saw a lady today who veered across the double yellow lines to cut in front of a garbage truck. (If she was that late for work, I think she should have left her house sooner!)

I am therefore not opposed to government, which according to the Good Book is “the servant of God” for the public good (Romans 13). But I am opposed to the hijacking of government to serve the rich. That was the main point of “Knee-Capping the Peasants,” the fact that the few who are rich and powerful have created a system known as the “official” global economy which has turned the many poor into the prey of the rich. Now that the poor are realizing this and now that the system is breaking, the rich masters of the system are actively trying to hinder anyone who tries to create alternative systems. One of their tools is the use of corrupt governments to criminalize or marginalize these alternative systems.

I am totally in favor of legislation that mandates safe durable goods or children's toys or food. I am against legislation that pretends to mandate these things, yet whose actual effect is to drive small businesses and small farms out of business. But this was the aim, goal and desired effect of much of the legislation proposed by right-wing Republican congressmen and signed into law by George W. Bush over the last eight years. This was also true of some key pieces of legislation enacted during the Clinton administration. Indeed, one could view the Bush presidency as a huge amplification of policies favorable to big business that were first enacted during the Democratic Clinton years.

These policies had the effect of concentrating ever more political and economic power in the hands of an ever-smaller group of private individuals while destroying any alternatives raised up by small, relatively powerless individuals. Time would fail me if I listed all the examples, from the early restrictions on Internet radio stations to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to the National Animal Identification System to the Patriot Act, and so on. It was partly to escape and reverse such policies that many people latched onto Barack Obama's promise of “Change!” and voted for him.

Now it is clear that the Democrats are just as much servants of corporatists as the Republicans, and are just as beholden to the rich interests who actually run our country. When Democrats are caught supporting legislation that increases the power of the rich while removing self-sufficiency from the poor, this provides a huge opening for people on the Right to say, “See there? This proves that all big government is bad, and that all government restrictions should be done away with!” The spokesmen for the Right say these things, not in honesty, but in order to support their agenda of removing all government restrictions from the rich so that they may have full freedom to amass more riches without regard for the effect of their actions on others.

This hypocrisy of the Right highlights a present danger to the Obama administration. For while there's very little difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, they fight hard against each other during elections. I think it's because they both “like ice cream cones.” The two parties are like two children who both love the ice cream cone” of political office, yet who are locked in a fight to the death because there's only one ice cream cone and they won't share. The Presidency of the United States is a three-scooper, with mint 'n' chip, rocky road and pecan fudge – and topped by a cherry! Now the Right in this country is very upset, not only because they lost the election, but even more because the tongue of a black man is licking a cone that they had wanted kept for lighter-skinned mouths.

This explains the fierceness of the rhetoric of the Right against Obama. Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress supported the deregulation of the banking and real estate sectors which contributed to our present collapse. Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress voted to pass the series of bailouts that began in 2008. A Republican president insisted that the nation had to enact these bailouts in order to “save the economy.” Yet there are right-wing pundits and news outlets who seek to point all public outrage over these things and over the economic collapse to Obama. (See this for instance: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/bonuses-bailouts-and-blame/ and http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/03/05/populist_rage/)

The corporate masters who control the Republican party use this rhetoric and blaming by the Republicans to continue to legitimize their agenda of removing all government restrictions to their actions, while they characterize the Democrats as the party of “big government.” But both sides pursue the same basic policies. Unfortunately, their actions have the effect of encouraging the ideology of selfishness promoted by Ayn Rand – at a time when we need to embrace community-based, collective, cooperative solutions to the problems we now face, solutions which in many cases will require government involvement in order to be most effective. When Democrats or Republicans push corporatist policies that benefit the rich while causing pain to ordinary people, they convince ordinary people that all government is bad, weakening the case for government intervention to deal with our present mess.

(P.S. If you want to see another example of right-wing selfishness and wackiness, see page 8 of the mid-March 2009 Fullerton Observer. You can get it here: http://www.fullertonobserver.com/)

Our Least Resilient Neighborhoods

(Warning: This post is long.) Non-minority, middle- to upper-middle class families are the media's frequent focus nowadays when discussing struggling neighborhoods, households and families in the context of our present economic crisis and the challenge posed by Peak Oil. This is seen in recent news articles such as the New York Times piece titled, “You Try To Live on 500K in This Town”; the CNN stories titled, “Bad Economy? Do What You Love,” and “From Beverly Hills To Shoveling Manure On A Farm”; the Colorado Springs Gazette piece titled, “Youth Hockey Surviving Economic Crunch”; and the CBS Evening News story titled, “One Family's Recession – How A Single Family's Life Is Shifting Amid A Slumping Economy.”

These stories and others like them have common elements: namely, how affluent, usually blond, educated suburbanite and high-class urbanite families are coping, financially, psychologically and interpersonally with being forced by present circumstances to give up some of the more optional parts of their lives. Some stories chronicle the mental and emotional processes some of these individuals go through in discovering that things formerly considered to be “necessities” are, in fact, optional. And these stories are all uniformly told in warm, sensitive, empathetic tones by the American mainstream media.

But there is another, less-noticed segment of the American population that is getting absolutely slammed by the present economic collapse. Even before the collapse, their lives were lived precariously exposed above an unforgiving economic landscape lacking any safety net. Many of these people are people of color. Most of them would dearly love to trade their present lives for the supposed struggle of “trying” to live in a place like New York City for “only” $500K a year. The stories of most of these people are not covered by the mainstream media. These are the citizens of our least resilient neighborhoods, who lack the capital needed to recover from even the smallest crisis. I'd like to begin in some small way to tell their story now. My story has paralleled their story at significant times in my life. I will speak from the point of view of the black American community, since I am black, although the processes which have existed for a long time in the black community are now working everywhere.

While Men Slept...

The American civil rights struggle of the 1950's and 1960's was a landmark time that yielded important victories for black people struggling against murderous racism. Those victories included the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that ended school segregation; the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the first appearances of black men and women in intelligent roles in TV and film. Great legislative and judicial strides were made at the Federal level to render both de jure and de facto segregation illegal, and these were followed by affirmative action programs to redress the evils caused by the old segregationist laws and social arrangements.

During the 1970's, however, some voices began to make premature declarations that “We've made great strides! Surely America has risen above its ugly past. The civil rights struggle is over!” And in the 1980's, certain individuals and groups began stating that affirmative action was no longer needed, having accomplished its purpose. Some of these people even initiated lawsuits designed to end affirmative action in higher education and hiring for government jobs. Such declarations of a successful end to the civil rights struggle served to dull the awareness of the nation and to put everyone – black people included – to sleep. But the truth is that affirmative action had not gone nearly far enough in rectifying the inequalities between the American black community and the rest of American society.

The secret dismantling

By 1970, many of the gains made by black America were already beginning to be dismantled. Some elements of that dismantling were deliberate, but others were simply a consequence of the general re-ordering of American society due to changing economic conditions.

To understand the re-ordering, remember that the 1960's were the period of the last great expansion of industrial/manufacturing activity in the United States. This resulted in increased demand for skilled manufacturing employees and an increased number of openings for highly-paid manufacturing jobs. This increase in demand occurred at the same time as the strongest and most visible pushes were being made by those in the civil rights movement for equal access to jobs. Black workers were concentrated most heavily in those cities whose manufacturing base was expanding and where the demand for skilled manufacturing workers was greatest. And skilled, highly-paid manufacturing jobs were a key rung on the ladder of advancing material well-being, since such jobs could be used to pay for things like home ownership and college education.

However, the 1970's saw the reversal of manufacturing in the United States, the outsourcing of manufacturing overseas, and the beginning of the transformation of the American economy into a “service” economy. This coincided with the peak and resulting decline in American oil production and was partly caused by that peak. While this transformation devastated many communities, especially cities that depended on local industry, it was especially hard on the black community, since so many black workers had begun to rely on skilled, highly-paid manufacturing jobs as a means of climbing the ladder of advancement, and now this rung was being taken out from under them.

There was also the dismantling of enforcement of equal opportunity legislation and judicial rulings. The United States Equal Opportunity Employment Commission was created via the 1964 Civil Rights Act championed by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and passed by Congress. As originally created, the EEOC was a rather toothless body incapable of any real enforcement. But surprisingly, it was President Nixon who proposed giving the EEOC the power to file discrimination suits against companies on behalf of citizens. This power was granted by Congress in the early 1970's. And President Carter further amplified the power and scope of the EEOC.

But President Reagan sought to dismantle the EEOC, changing it from being an activist champion of equal employment to being merely a rubber-stamp approver of a status quo enacted by the private sector. Reagan packed the EEOC with appointees who believed that government was the problem in modern society and not the solution to problems. He also slashed more than 10 percent from the EEOC budget during his first years. This dismantling of minority protection was continued under President Bush (the Elder) from 1989 to 1992, as noted in a Chicago Sun-Times article from 1992 which documented Senate hearings in which plaintiffs described the poor performance of the EEOC under the chairmanship of Bush appointee Evan Kemp (who was a champion of the disabled, by the way).

Although funding increased modestly under President Clinton, the Clinton-appointed EEOC chair channeled a large proportion of discrimination claims to binding arbitration instead of more aggressive action, and encouraged a large number of plaintiffs to settle with their employers instead of investigating their complaints. And the administration of President Bush (the Younger) resulted in a loss of 20 percent of EEOC staff from 2000 to 2006, constant calls by President Bush to cut the EEOC budget, and a swelling of the EEOC's case backlog to over 40,000 in 2007. In 2008, when Congress approved an appropriations bill that would have increased the EEOC budget by $50 million more than the President's request, Bush threatened to veto it.

This dismantling of protections and the assertion that such protections were not needed also extended to housing, where studies performed in the 1980's showed clearly that housing discrimination still existed. A Washington Post article from 1993 described the “collapse” in HUD enforcement of anti-bias policies at the national and regional levels. This set the stage for the present sub-prime crisis as experienced by the minority community.

Present Threats To The Minority Community

There are three main threats menacing the minority community at present. The first is the economic victimization which exists because of the dismantling of government protections. That victimization is via predatory lending practices leading to foreclosures and loss of home ownership in minority neighborhoods, as well as ongoing job discrimination. In 2005 and 2006, over 50 percent of all loans made to black Americans, and over 40 percent to Latinos were subprime, as opposed to only 19 percent of white borrowers. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan recently stated on National Public Radio that a black American earning more than $100,000 was more likely than a white person who earned less than $35,000 to be put into a high cost, subprime loan.

These loans carried “exploding” adjustable rates and high prepayment penalties which made them impossible to refinance. These loans were also made by brokers who received kickbacks from lenders for selling subprime loans. And they were often made with the expectation that the lender would sooner or later be able to make money through repossession and resale of a borrower's house. In other words, these loans were designed to fail. The most damnable aspect of these loans was that many of these loans were not marketed to people wanting to buy McMansions, but were marketed as a way for first-time borrowers with existing mortgages to save money on monthly payments through refinancing or as a means to finance home improvements.

Now these loans have begun to bear their poisonous fruit, people are being thrown out of their homes, and these homes sit vacant or are vandalized, or are targeted for demolition to make way for “redevelopment” and “gentrification” to provide new opportunities for builders, lenders and realtors to make money.

The second threat to the minority community comes from the war on drugs and the disproportionate incarceration that has resulted from it. The war on drugs as originally conceived by President Nixon was a genuine attempt to halt the spread of drug use in the United States, and it relied on treatment as its first weapon. But that war took on a different character under President Reagan, who made mandatory sentencing one of his weapons of choice, and who signed a drug enforcement bill with provisions deliberately written to favor harsher sentencing of minorities. This was done deviously, by such things as imposing more lenient sentencing guidelines for the use of powdered cocaine (preferred by white users) versus crack cocaine (preferred by black users). As a result of this bias (perpetuated through the Clinton and Bush presidencies), in 2006 black Americans made up an estimated 15 percent of drug users, but accounted for 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges, 59 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Even now in places like Portland, Oregon, black men are more likely than white or Hispanic men to be stopped, arrested, jailed and sentenced to prison for the same offense.

But there is also evidence that the Federal government took an active role in promoting drug use in the black community, in part to fund covert operations to overthrow governments hostile to American business interests. This evidence was first presented by journalists on behalf of the Christic Institute in 1986, and was corroborated in an investigation by Senator John Kerry in 1988, as well as by journalist Gary Webb in 1996 reports in the San Jose Mercury News. Further corroboration comes from a 1998 report published by CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz, as well as the writings of Catherine Austin-Fitts, who also wrote of the efforts of the Clinton Administration to suppress this evidence.

The third threat to minority communities comes from gangs and gang culture. Undoubtedly there is a home-grown element to this culture, as evidenced in the “Soul Patrol” I encountered in my younger days. This “Soul Patrol” consists of belligerent young black men who attack any black person whom they consider to be acting too “white”. “Acting white” is defined as speaking intelligently, working hard, trying to educate oneself, or showing an interest in anything other than hanging out, chasing women, or “getting over” on the system. Later I discovered that other ethnic groups have their own version of the “Soul Patrol.” This “Soul Patrol” mentality directly reinforces the present gang culture. But the times now facing us will demand that all of us function as productive and useful members of society, regardless of ethnic background. Those who refuse, who choose instead to be homeboys keepin' it real, may find themselves facing a backlash from the productive citizens of our society.

Yet I have to wonder sometimes if the present reinforcement of gang culture is coming entirely from within the minority community. Just as the drug problem in the minority community is being sustained by forces outside that community, I suspect that the same thing may be true of gang culture. I think especially of the popularization and promotion of gangsta, hip-hop and other “urban” culture in the mainstream media, which continues to reinforce a dysfunctional stereotype of “cool” blackness that sells, yet has nothing to do with reality. But researching and developing that hypothesis is a subject for another day.

Fostering Resilience

One measure of neighborhood resilience is “the Solari Index,” a simple metric devised by Catherine Austin-Fitts to describe how safe, healthy and liveable a neighborhood is. Ms. Fitts also points out in her writings that extremely powerful and rich interests have made a great deal of money from the business of breaking neighborhoods. Minority neighborhods have been the historical targets of choice for breakage, though the appetite of the rich and powerful has expanded to the point where they are breaking any neighborhood whose breakage might yield a profit.

Building resilient neighborhoods therefore consists of devising effective defenses against breakage, repairing the culture of the neighborhoods and fostering neighborhood self-sufficiency. I will explore these elements in further posts, God willing.

Links To Sources:

Concerning How The Affluent Are “Coping” with Recession

• “You Try To Live on 500K in This Town,”New York Times , (www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/fashion/08halfmill.html?_r=1)

• “Bad Economy? Do What You Love,” CNN, (www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/02/24/economy.career/index.html)

• “From Beverly Hills To Shoveling Manure On A Farm,” CNN, (www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/02/26/economy.survivor.farm/index.html?iref=mpstoryview)

• “Youth Hockey Surviving Economic Crunch,” Colorado Springs Gazette, (www.gazette.com/sports/hockey_47994___article.html/dues_year.html),

• “One Family's Recession – How A Single Family's Life Is Shifting Amid A Slumping Economy,” CBS Evening News, (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/11/eveningnews/main3703133.shtml?source=RSSattr=Business_3703133)

Concerning Black Economic Progress, Home Ownership, Predatory Lending and “Steering”

• “Black Homeowner News,” www.blackhomeownernews.com/index.html

• “Black Families' Economic Progress Slowed,” www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/11/13/black_economic_progress_slowed/

• “Home Loans Discriminate, Study Shows,” New York Times, 13 May 1998 (from the Clinton years; take note!), http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802EEDC1430F930A25756C0A96E958260&fta=y

• “Good, Bad of Black Homeownership Discussed,” NTIC blog, http://nticnews.blogspot.com/2005/08/good-bad-of-black-homeownership.html

• A Turbulent Voyage: Readings In African American Studies, Third Edition, Floyd W. Hayes, et. al., Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2000 (http://books.google.com/books?id=Wu0qQdMCdvIC&pg=PA480&lpg=PA480&dq=black+employment+manufacturing+1970%27s&source=bl&ots=GUu0cnRdc8&sig=7Nx2FseYSZAhn7GrItJDX-qXD9g#PPP1,M1)

• “Black Job Loss Deja-Vu,” Betsy Leondar-Wright, Black Commentator, http://www.blackcommentator.com/95/95_black_jobs.html

• “Where Did The Water Come In?”, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, The Nation, 20 February 2008, http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/287768

Concerning U.S. Federal Government Civil Rights Protection

• “Richard Nixon,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_nixon. (Nixon may be one of America's most misunderstood and misrepresented presidents, although some of this was of his own doing.)

• “A Letter From J. Clay Smith,” United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, http://www.eeoc.gov/abouteeoc/35th/voices/smith.html

• The United States Since 1980, Dean Baker, Cambridge University Press, 2007 (www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521860172 and http://books.google.com/books?id=Ofb-1KeZJ1IC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75&dq=eeoc+%22president+reagan%22+budget&source=bl&ots=4J0HNVmENO&sig=gEB-rsPFgZH4osCL75HYHgtvXpA)

• “Jobs Discrimination Agency Lightening Its Load,” New York Times, 22 February 1999, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9905E3DF133DF931A15751C0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Concerning Drugs, Gangs and the Solari Index

• “The War On Drugs' War On Minorities,” Los Angeles Times, 24 March 2007, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-huffington24mar24,1,4064763.story

• “The War On Drugs,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Possible_U.S._government_involvement_in_cocaine_trafficking

• “Narcodollars For Beginners – Part 3, Drugs as Currency,” Catherine Austin-Fitts et. al., http://www.drugwar.com/fittsnarco3.shtm

• “Solari And The Rise Of The Rule Of Law,” Catherine Austin-Fitts, http://solari.com/articles/SolariRiseRuleLaw.htm

The War On Frugality

The present energy and economic crises in the world have caused the return of a long-forgotten culture of frugality in the United States and other First World nations. The return of this culture is due to a grassroots movement among ordinary, everyday citizens who don't have many resources and who are tired of being taken for everything they've got by large corporate masters. This culture of frugality is gaining such strength and spreading so rapidly that voices in the mainstream media are now starting to comment on it, as seen in the following articles:

• “In Recession, Frugality Makes A Comeback,” Los Angeles Times, 13 January 2009, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/valley/la-fi-pennywise13-2009jan13,0,4887711.story

• “Making Frugality A Habit,” New York Times, 9 January 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/your-money/household-budgeting/10cost.html

• “Ladera Couple Prospers By Living Below Means,” Orange County Register, 16 January 2009, http://economy.freedomblogging.com/2009/01/16/ladera-couple-prospers-by-living-below-means/

• “Frugal Is Cool In Cash-Strapped US,” The Guardian, 4 January 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/04/us-economy-thrift-barack-obama

It might seem to be a good sign that a movement toward sensibility and living within one's means is getting the attention of national media. Yet we must remember that the national media are owned, by and large, by powerful, rich corporatist masters with a vested interest in reviving and growing the “official” economy, which is first and foremost a consumer economy run by big business. Living within one's means, getting out of debt and turning one's back on consumerism is not good for business or for the official economy.

It is therefore no surprise that the masters of our economy have begun to attack this movement toward frugality and simple living. The attack has come in various forms, including media articles which talk about the damage done to the economy by people who refuse to rush out and buy things. Here are some samples:

• “Return to D.I.Y Ethic Erodes Service Businesses,” New York Times, 16 January 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/business/17services.html?ref=business. The Times article contains this amazing quote: “All of these consumers could praise themselves for their newfound frugality in the midst of an economic downturn. But ever step they take toward self-reliance – each shrub they prune themselves, each cupcake they bake from scratch – hurts the people and small businesses that have long provided these services professionally.”

• “Hard-Hit Families Finally Start Saving, Aggravating Nation's Economic Woes,” Wall Street Journal, 6 January 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123120525879656021.html. Again, here's an amazing quote: “Americans, fresh off a decadeslong (sic) buying spree, are finally saving more and spending less – just as the economy needs their dollars the most.”

• For those who live in the United Kingdom, there's this: “This Recession Demands That We Employ Logic And Spend Our Way Out Of It,” UK Telegraph, 13 January 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/rogerbootle/4218744/This-recession-demands-that-we-employ-logic-and-spend-our-way-out-of-it.html

• “Don't Be Frugal To Follow Recession Chic,” Marketplace, 17 December 2008, http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/12/17/wilkinson/. This is an archived radio show featuring Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute, a right-wing think tank. One more amazing quote, from the show's introduction: “It's natural to want to penny-pinch when in a recession, but if you're not at risk of financial struggle, you may not need to cut back. Commentator Will Wilkinson says if you can, you should keep on spending.”

Here is rich irony! We are suffering an ecological and economic disaster caused by the decision by the masters of the global economy to hoodwink ordinary citizens and their governments to live beyond their means for as long as possible. These masters created an economy that is built on debt and that runs on credit and that devours anyone who can't make his payments on time. That economy has begun to crash, leaving millions of bloodied victims in the aftermath of its fall. These victims have been turned into the prey of the rich masters of this economy. Now that we ordinary people are seeing all of these things come to pass, we are trying to protect ourselves from being jacked any further by getting out of debt, living within our means and learning to be self-reliant. And you mean to tell me that the spokesmen for the rich are trying to make us feel guilty for this?!

But it gets even better. Not only are the masters of our official economy trying to talk us common people out of frugality, but they are even enlisting the help of the government to punish and frustrate frugal living. Cases in point:

• The Times of England recently published an editorial titled, “Punish Savers And Make Them Spend Money (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article5469589.ece),” full of policy recommendations for the governments of the United States and Great Britain. One such suggestion is as follows: “Instead of reducing taxes on interest payments, the Government could tax all bank deposits and other risk-free savings. This would create a negative risk-free interest rate, encouraging savers either to invest in property, shares and other productive assets – or simply to save less and consume more.”

• The United States Government has passed a law, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, that will require all thrift stores to test all toys and clothes sold for children for contamination by lead or lead-based paint, starting in February 2009. (Source: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-thrift2-2009jan02,0,2083247.story) The testing is designed to be so expensive that thrift stores – thrift stores! – will be forced to stop selling secondhand children's clothes and toys because they will not be able to afford the tests. This law will also drive the makers of handcrafted toys and handmade clothes out of business, as well as shutting down other cottage industries. You'll just have to go to Mervyn's or Wal-Mart or Toys 'R' Us instead. After many people protested, the Consumer Product Safety Commission modified its proposed enforcement of the law to grant thrift stores a temporary reprieve, but the law is still on the books.

Note: This law is typical of recent legislation and executive orders passed or enacted by the Federal Government. Other examples include the National Animal Identification System, proposed ostensibly to “keep the nation's food supply safe from terrorists,” whose real effect is to drive small livestock farmers out of business. There are also the cumbersome FDA regulations recently enacted for small slaughterhouses, regulations that are so expensive to obey that only big agribusinesses can comply. The funny thing about these laws is that they don't protect us from contamination via products sold by big businesses with lots of money.

Make no mistake. Frugality is one tool by which ordinary, rank-and-file people can become self-reliant and can free themselves from exploitation by a corporatist system controlled by the rich. The rich masters of our present system understand this, and will do everything they can to wage war against the frugal and the self-reliant. But we're on to them. Do these things make you mad? Then let your congressman know that you've got his number.

I leave you with the following quote from the novel The Likeness, by Tana French. I read the quote for the first time on the Schneier on Security website. Here it is:

“Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power -- governments, employers -- exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient -- not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you're doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you've persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you've indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who -- either because they're heroically brave, or because they're insane, or because they know themselves to be safe -- are free from fear.”