America: Between a Rock and Hard Place

"Remember, we’re all in this alone" - Lily Tomlin

Click here to read a beautiful post by Sandra Magnus

(CALGARY, Alberta) - I suggest that the United States is basically over. The word just hasn’t gotten around yet to all the states.

ITEM

In March, 2009, astronaut Sandra Magnus was a mission specialist at the International Space Station. Asked what the earth looks like from the ISS, she said:

Up here I've seen the world from a different viewpoint. I see it as a whole system, I don't see it as a group of individual people or individual countries. We are one huge group of people and we're all in it together.

This is a reality to many people on earth but Americans, as a nation, as a people, as a culture—deny and reject this philosophy.

Lily Tomlin: "Remember, we’re all in this alone."

ITEM

The moral of fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer’s "Pardoner’s Tale," was radix malorum est cupiditas: greed is the root of all evil. This is not an unknown sentiment, but it is one that America has ignored to its peril.

ITEM

Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five) were together at a party given by a billionaire hedge fund manager in the 1990s. Vonnegut said that the billionaire made more in a day than Heller had earned through the entire history of Catch-22. Heller replied with: Yes, but I have something he will never have…enough.

ITEM

Eugene Debs was a five-time socialist party candidate for President and in 1918 was sentenced to federal prison for making a speech opposing American entry to the First World War (an interesting crime in the so-called land of free speech). In court, he said:

I believe, in common with all Socialists, that this nation ought to own and control its own industries. I believe, as all Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned—that industry, the basis of our social life, instead of being the private property of the few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all . . . I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

If people like Debs had been taken seriously, America might have avoided today’s obscene reality where the C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies in 1980 earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker, but 531 times as much in 2001.

Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

(In a 2003 article, conservative columnist David Brooks wrote that Americans "have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us are really poor; we’re just pre-rich." In seven years, the bottom has fallen out of America.)

Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times

Nicholas Kristof reported in the NYT that

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. (November 6, 2010)

In a later column (November 17) he continued:

What kind of a country do we aspire to be? Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent? Oops! That’s already us The top 1 percent of Americans owns 34 percent of America’s private net worth… The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent…[and] the top 10 percent controls more than 70 percent of Americans’ total net worth .

America today

Bob Herbert in the NYT (November 19, 2010) writes:

Bob Herbert is with the NY Times

• However you want to define the American dream, there is not much of it that’s left anymore.
• We’re in denial about the extent of the rot in the system, and the effort that would be required to turn things around. It will likely take many years, perhaps a decade or more, to get employment back to a level at which one could fairly say the economy is thriving.
• We’ve become a hapless, can’t-do society, and it’s, frankly, embarrassing. Public figures talk endlessly about "transformative changes" in public education, but the years go by and we see no such thing. Politicians across the spectrum insist that they are all about job creation while the employment situation in the real world remains beyond pathetic.
• All we are good at is bulldozing money to the very wealthy. No wonder the country is in such a deep slide.

A week later (November 26) he went on:

The ranks of the poor may be swelling and families forced out of their foreclosed homes may be enduring a nightmarish holiday season, but American companies have just experienced their most profitable quarter ever. As The Times reported this week, U.S. firms earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter—the highest total since the government began keeping track more than six decades ago.

In the Gettysburg Address Abraham Lincoln declared that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Oops. It’s already happened. The American political system is now a government of the plutocracy, by the plutocracy and for the plutocracy.

Plutocracy

Frank Rich wrote a column, "Still the best Congress money can buy," (November 27, 2010) where he said that the one topic that is studiously ignored is

the big money that dominates our political system, regardless of who’s in power. Two years after the economic meltdown, most Americans now recognize that that money has inexorably institutionalized a caste system where everyone remains (at best) mired in economic stasis except the very wealthiest sliver.

Wall Street, he says, is

• an industry that can [easily] buy politicians…which is why government has tilted the playing field ever more in its direction for three decades. Now corporations of all kinds can buy more of Washington than before, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and to the rise of outside "nonprofit groups" that can legally front for those who prefer to donate anonymously. The money laundering at the base of Tom DeLay’s conviction by a Texas jury last week—his circumventing of the state’s post-Gilded Age law forbidding corporate campaign contributions directly to candidates—is now easily and legally doable at the national level.
• The story of recent corporate political donations—which we may never learn in its entirety—is just beginning to be told. Bloomberg News reported after Election Day that the United States Chamber of Commerce’s anti-Democratic war chest included a mind-boggling $86 million contribution　from the insurance lobby to fight the health care bill. The Times has identified other big chamber donors as Prudential Financial, Goldman Sachs and Chevron. These are hardly the small businesses that the chamber’s G.O.P. allies claim to be championing.
• He concludes: America needs a rally—or, better still, a leader or two or three—to restore not just honor or sanity to its citizens but governance that’s not auctioned off to the highest bidder..

In 1932, many on the political right voted for FDR, believing he would be friendly to business. Once elected, he kept one election promise—to end Prohibition. But to the fury of the business community and to the relief of the nation’s unemployed, he established the first minimum wage, guaranteed unions the right to bargain collectively, created Social Security and unemployment insurance, and enacted more than 500 regulatory codes that capped industrial production, set wages and prices, limited competition and encouraged government-backed manufacturing cartels.

In the three-quarters of a century since the New Deal, Republicans have overtly and actively undermined it and since 2000, have gone public in their wish to turn America against its own people.

The Chamber of Commerce put $33 million of secret funds to work in the mid-term elections to support Republicans who tried to block the health care legislation. Secret donors spent at least $138 million on the midterm elections, according to the latest figures, and 80 percent of that secret money supported Republican candidates.

9/11

The 9-11 outrage was an attack on America as a whole. Now, more than nine years later, many of the first responders are increasingly suffering health problems as a result of their heroic efforts to defend their fellow Americans. But this is no longer recognized by the plutocratic senate. The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act is a $7.4 billion bill proposed by Democrats that has been blocked by the Republicans in the senate on the grounds that it is not affordable. If the bill is not passed by the current Congress, Democrats will have to start over next year in a Republican controlled House.

At the same time, the unemployed who need extended benefits, have been held hostage by the Republicans who will allow that portion of the tax bill to pass, provided the tax cuts for the wealthy remain. President Obama has caved in to this demand. As Paul Krugman writes ("Obama’s Hostage Deal", December 9, 2010):

Republicans got what they wanted—an extension of all the Bush tax cuts, including those for the wealthy. This part of the deal was bad all around. Yes, some of those tax cuts would be spent, boosting the economy to some extent. But a large part of the tax cuts, especially those for the wealthy, would not be spent, so the tax-cut extension increases the budget deficit a lot while doing little to reduce unemployment. And by stringing things along, the extension increases the chances that the Bush tax cuts will be made permanent, with devastating effects on the budget and the long-term prospects for Social Security and Medicare.

Chris Van Hollen, Dem. Maryland, represented House Democrats in the formal negotiations on the tax issue:

"These guys were outmaneuvered in the negotiation at the price of $25 billion on the national credit card, made payable to 6,600 families." This works out to an average benefit of nearly $4 million for each wealthy family.

Representative Peter A. DeFazio, Dem. Oregon, urged the House Democratic Caucus to oppose the proposal:

We have taken a position that this is not an acceptable package. It’s way too expensive to benefit a very few. We want something that is targeted to the people in need.

Two years before becoming president, Abraham Lincoln gave a now-famous speech where he said: "A house divided against itself cannot stand," which comes from Matthew 12:25: "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand." Lincoln was referring to the division of the country between slave and free states. He went on to say: I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other

America is now divided as it has never been before, with a hyper-partisan split basically 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. The poison that has seeped into the body politic since 2000 is so pervasive that probably the only thing that could unite Americans again would be an attack by extraterrestrials—if that.

In 2007, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, "The Cheney Imperative" by Stephen F. Hayes. Hayes quoted George Tenet who was asked in a TV interview about the value of the controversial interrogation programs. He quoted Tenet as saying: "Here’s what I would say to you, to the Congress, to the American people, to the president of the Untied [sic] States…

A Freudian slip, perhaps, but it reflects the American reality.

Speculation

Nothing lasts indefinitely but Americans, against overwhelming evidence, believe they are the exception. The U.S. is the longest running and largest democracy the world has ever seen. I wonder, though, if as a democracy, it hasn’t gotten too large, too diverse. When you look at the geographical differences, it’s obvious that the people of Texas, are culturally distinct from the people of the New England states, who are culturally distinct from the people the Midwest, who are culturally distinct from the northwest states.

The U.S. wouldn’t be the first, or the last, geographical and cultural empire to fall apart. In our own time we saw the break up of the old Soviet Union. It was not a democracy, but it was held together by ideology—as is the U.S.

Or Yugoslavia, which was a diverse geographical and political entity made up of Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia. It was primarily held together by strongman Josip Tito from 1943 to his death in 1980. It also had a diverse variety of religions with more than two thirds of the people declaring themselves to be religious believers.

Like Yugoslavia, the United States is really four or five geographical/cultural regions held together by the mythology of 1776 (for States-rights people, it's 50). As an analogy, I’m going to quote the medical essayist Lewis Thomas from A Long Line of Cells:

Death is not a sudden-all-at-once affair, cells go down in sequence, one by one. You can, if you like, recover great numbers of them many hours after the lights have gone out, and grow them in cultures. It takes hours, even days, before the irreversible word finally gets around to all the provinces.

I suggest that the United States is basically over. The word just hasn’t gotten around yet to all the states.

Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class — a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably on a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves — writing and trying to make the world a better place