By Manifesto Joe
Barack Obama may go down as a one-term president, given the corporate money that is almost certainly coming to bear against him after the recent Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance. But he's telling Republicans, with no uncertainty, that he's not quitting, and will be in their faces until the day he has to leave office.
Obama was very presidential, and nothing short of brilliant, during his videotaped encounter with House Republicans during their Baltimore retreat Friday. This may have been one last bid to get across to an intractable opposition that, with the current caliber of partisanship, absolutely nothing will get done. And, there will be somebody to blame for that.
The president hit many of these doctrinaire righties in an uncomfortable spot when he talked about their response to his general health-care overhaul proposal. This had the endorsement of former GOP Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker and Bob Dole, and of former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. It's a "centrist" proposal, Obama emphasized.
But, the Republican reception was such that, "you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot." There was uncomfortable tittering in the hall. Obama didn't back down or even blink once. That's what the response was like, he reiterated.
The Republicans in the House have been playing to their right-wing constituents, exaggerating a milquetoast overhaul into some "radical" government takeover of health care. Obama stood in front of them and basically told them so.
One thing I was very proud of seeing was a U.S. president who can not only speak English, but do so extemporaneously and very eloquently. I think it bothers some of the Republicans that they are up against someone this articulate and formidable.
But the most important thing that happened Friday was that Obama signaled to the so-called "loyal" opposition -- let's see something realistic. He pointed out that the notion of 30 million more Americans being covered for health care at no additional cost is -- well, fantasy. And, the idea of offering private insurance coverage across state lines? Fine, but with no standards for such, the insurance companies are certain to cherry-pick healthy people, among myriad other possible abuses.
I was encouraged by something that will probably be what progressives will have to settle for, for the next 20 or more years, after the Supreme Court's decision to give the country over to huge corporations. Obama shows a fighting spirit, at least within the framework of trying to get results. He's not quitting.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
R.I.P., J.D. Salinger: 1919-2010
By Manifesto Joe
What were your favorite books in high school? If one of your answers was The Catcher in the Rye, chances are you were a misfit, at least in spirit, for some of your life.
Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of that much-read 1951 American novel, was a 16-year-old outsider who felt the pain of living on the outside, but still wouldn't have it any other way. The confirmed loner behind the book, J.D. Salinger, must have been writing a lot of autobiography there. From the time he was in his middle 30s, he lived reclusively on a New Hampshire farm, and he retired from publishing his work in 1965. He'd had enough of the larger world, and apparently found his own, to his liking, in utter seclusion.
I didn't think he would ever die. I thought they'd have to drive a stake through his heart.
I always felt that Salinger wrote enough of a book, and that I understood so well where he was coming from, that I was never very curious about what he was doing all those decades, or whether he had any other literary treasures locked away in his safe. He spoke for multiple generations of young male outsiders, and so eloquently that I empathized completely with his need for solitude.
Posthumous victory has come for Salinger in the small flood of renewed media interest in him right after his death, and even 45 years after his literary retirement. A man who spent more than half his life as a hermit, he's getting more attention now than almost all writers who seriously try to win the world's brief, icy recognition. Somewhere, he must be chuckling a little over that.
Not many people ever knew Salinger very well. But somehow, out there in the larger world, millions of us knew Holden Caulfield, and all too well. We caught glimpses of him in the mirror every day. Every time we got dumped by our shallow first girlfriends, every time we were repelled by the crude vanity of all the Robert Stratladers out there, every time we ran afoul of some musty character posing as a teacher, every time the essential cruelty of human existence became nakedly obvious -- we saw, and knew, Holden. He was the guy in the mirror.
I'm going on 54, and I still often see the world through Holden's eyes. There really isn't life after high school -- hell, life IS high school. The creepy, semicompetent teachers are all there -- they became bosses. The Stratladers become crude, paunchy has-beens who are still vain enough to presume to make a pass at your wife. The essential cruelty of human existence is still nakedly obvious too many times.
Here's to you, J.D., for getting to tell it like it is, one very glorious time. That's about as much as any misfit can aspire to.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
What were your favorite books in high school? If one of your answers was The Catcher in the Rye, chances are you were a misfit, at least in spirit, for some of your life.
Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of that much-read 1951 American novel, was a 16-year-old outsider who felt the pain of living on the outside, but still wouldn't have it any other way. The confirmed loner behind the book, J.D. Salinger, must have been writing a lot of autobiography there. From the time he was in his middle 30s, he lived reclusively on a New Hampshire farm, and he retired from publishing his work in 1965. He'd had enough of the larger world, and apparently found his own, to his liking, in utter seclusion.
I didn't think he would ever die. I thought they'd have to drive a stake through his heart.
I always felt that Salinger wrote enough of a book, and that I understood so well where he was coming from, that I was never very curious about what he was doing all those decades, or whether he had any other literary treasures locked away in his safe. He spoke for multiple generations of young male outsiders, and so eloquently that I empathized completely with his need for solitude.
Posthumous victory has come for Salinger in the small flood of renewed media interest in him right after his death, and even 45 years after his literary retirement. A man who spent more than half his life as a hermit, he's getting more attention now than almost all writers who seriously try to win the world's brief, icy recognition. Somewhere, he must be chuckling a little over that.
Not many people ever knew Salinger very well. But somehow, out there in the larger world, millions of us knew Holden Caulfield, and all too well. We caught glimpses of him in the mirror every day. Every time we got dumped by our shallow first girlfriends, every time we were repelled by the crude vanity of all the Robert Stratladers out there, every time we ran afoul of some musty character posing as a teacher, every time the essential cruelty of human existence became nakedly obvious -- we saw, and knew, Holden. He was the guy in the mirror.
I'm going on 54, and I still often see the world through Holden's eyes. There really isn't life after high school -- hell, life IS high school. The creepy, semicompetent teachers are all there -- they became bosses. The Stratladers become crude, paunchy has-beens who are still vain enough to presume to make a pass at your wife. The essential cruelty of human existence is still nakedly obvious too many times.
Here's to you, J.D., for getting to tell it like it is, one very glorious time. That's about as much as any misfit can aspire to.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Friday, January 22, 2010
With One Malevolent Decision On Campaign Finance, The Roberts Supreme Court Has Set Back Reform For Decades
By Manifesto Joe
Forget about the Massachusetts Senate election. Republican Scott Brown's win in a special election there is a minor setback compared to the Roberts court's 5-4 decision Thursday on campaign finance.
With the reaffirmation of the long-standing fiction of "a corporation is a legal person," the reactionary Roberts court has not only wrecked a century of movement away from that toxic idea. Now you can really forget about health-care reform, re-regulation of banking, and just about any other desperately needed overhaul you may have had in mind. We largely already had a plutocracy for much, if not most, of American history. Now it will be a wide-open auction, with the levers of government for sale to the highest bidders.
With virtually all restraints on the coffers of our corporate masters lifted by the judicial branch, it's all but certain that Republicans will make huge gains in the midterm elections in November, and also likely that Barack Obama will be a one-term president. In this decade we're probably going to see Supply Side 3, with Corporate America and wealthy individuals raking in still more immense gains at the expense of ordinary Americans. And the really sad aspect of it is that the people will largely have no one to blame but themselves, for failing time after time to see who their real friends, and enemies, are.
R.I.P., American republic
It was no mystery during all those years of Reagan, and Bushes I and II, what the intent was with all those right-wingers being appointed to the judiciary. These unelected people have the power to strangle the initiatives of the other two branches of government. And when the courts are stacked with reactionary ideologues, that's precisely what happens.
Labor unions are weaker than they've been for 80 years, so their money will be absolutely no match for what Corporate America will bring to the table. Unless some astonishingly good things happen within the next three years, look for Republicans to again become dominant with the inevitable financial largess, and for Democrats to atrophy once more into a timid centrist "opposition."
Plutocracy is now codified
If it wasn't plain enough after the theft of the 2000 presidential election, the U.S. has long been a plutocracy -- I would say that's been so since the years after World War II, almost uninterrupted, and off and on before then. Now, it's pretty much been made official.
With the corporate monoliths "free" to fund the candidates of their choice without limits, the American people will be saturated with laissez-faire propaganda, resulting in even more of them voting against their own interests, even more than they've already been doing for decades. They don't have to do this. In some locales on Earth, experience has taught common people to have a healthy skepticism about entrenched money and the power that naturally goes with it. Somehow, the American people never got in that habit, and experience has given them plenty of chances. Time after time, they seem to vote gladly to put the fox back in charge of the henhouse, then wonder what the hell happened to the chickens and the eggs.
Money becomes speech
"Rapid changes in technology -- and the creative dynamic inherent in the concept of free expression -- counsel against upholding a law that restricts political speech in certain media or by certain speakers,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. "The First Amendment does not permit Congress to make … categorical distinctions based on the corporate identity of the speaker and the content of the political speech."
The tragedy of this decision lies precisely in "rapid changes in technology." The sheer might of corporate money, when it comes to the purchase of air time, print space, Internet content, etc., is exactly what makes this turn of events so dangerous.
The five right-wing justices who voted for this atrocity cited free-speech rights as the basis of the decision. There could be no greater irony, for this will result in unprecedented stifling of political ideas. "Free speech" will be the domain of those who have the money to buy advertising in assorted for-profit media. The cacophony of "free-market" and perpetual-war rhetoric will quite predictably drown out those who would, in a system of sane restrictions and a public hearing available to all, have a chance to be heard.
In countries where democratic political campaigns are publicly financed, they think we've been crazy to have been allowing big money to dominate our process as much as it already does. But then, people in those same countries also think we're crazy to have a health-care system driven by the profit motive, essentially run by Big Insurance and Big Pharm. For a country generally considered to have resurrected the democratic-republican form of government from antiquity, we now seem to be lagging very far behind the serious practitioners.
Political history tends to run in cycles of reform and reaction. The U.S. seemed to be just emerging from an overlong period of reaction, giving progressives hope that a long period of reform, similar to those of the past, was getting under way.
This decision, it appears, is going to give the forces of reaction the power to drown civic reform in the bathtub long before it gets started this time, if you will pardon my paraphrasing of Grover Norquist.
I honestly don't see much hope after this -- unless the American people, at long last, wise up. I stopped holding my breath on that one a very long time ago.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Forget about the Massachusetts Senate election. Republican Scott Brown's win in a special election there is a minor setback compared to the Roberts court's 5-4 decision Thursday on campaign finance.
With the reaffirmation of the long-standing fiction of "a corporation is a legal person," the reactionary Roberts court has not only wrecked a century of movement away from that toxic idea. Now you can really forget about health-care reform, re-regulation of banking, and just about any other desperately needed overhaul you may have had in mind. We largely already had a plutocracy for much, if not most, of American history. Now it will be a wide-open auction, with the levers of government for sale to the highest bidders.
With virtually all restraints on the coffers of our corporate masters lifted by the judicial branch, it's all but certain that Republicans will make huge gains in the midterm elections in November, and also likely that Barack Obama will be a one-term president. In this decade we're probably going to see Supply Side 3, with Corporate America and wealthy individuals raking in still more immense gains at the expense of ordinary Americans. And the really sad aspect of it is that the people will largely have no one to blame but themselves, for failing time after time to see who their real friends, and enemies, are.
R.I.P., American republic
It was no mystery during all those years of Reagan, and Bushes I and II, what the intent was with all those right-wingers being appointed to the judiciary. These unelected people have the power to strangle the initiatives of the other two branches of government. And when the courts are stacked with reactionary ideologues, that's precisely what happens.
Labor unions are weaker than they've been for 80 years, so their money will be absolutely no match for what Corporate America will bring to the table. Unless some astonishingly good things happen within the next three years, look for Republicans to again become dominant with the inevitable financial largess, and for Democrats to atrophy once more into a timid centrist "opposition."
Plutocracy is now codified
If it wasn't plain enough after the theft of the 2000 presidential election, the U.S. has long been a plutocracy -- I would say that's been so since the years after World War II, almost uninterrupted, and off and on before then. Now, it's pretty much been made official.
With the corporate monoliths "free" to fund the candidates of their choice without limits, the American people will be saturated with laissez-faire propaganda, resulting in even more of them voting against their own interests, even more than they've already been doing for decades. They don't have to do this. In some locales on Earth, experience has taught common people to have a healthy skepticism about entrenched money and the power that naturally goes with it. Somehow, the American people never got in that habit, and experience has given them plenty of chances. Time after time, they seem to vote gladly to put the fox back in charge of the henhouse, then wonder what the hell happened to the chickens and the eggs.
Money becomes speech
"Rapid changes in technology -- and the creative dynamic inherent in the concept of free expression -- counsel against upholding a law that restricts political speech in certain media or by certain speakers,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. "The First Amendment does not permit Congress to make … categorical distinctions based on the corporate identity of the speaker and the content of the political speech."
The tragedy of this decision lies precisely in "rapid changes in technology." The sheer might of corporate money, when it comes to the purchase of air time, print space, Internet content, etc., is exactly what makes this turn of events so dangerous.
The five right-wing justices who voted for this atrocity cited free-speech rights as the basis of the decision. There could be no greater irony, for this will result in unprecedented stifling of political ideas. "Free speech" will be the domain of those who have the money to buy advertising in assorted for-profit media. The cacophony of "free-market" and perpetual-war rhetoric will quite predictably drown out those who would, in a system of sane restrictions and a public hearing available to all, have a chance to be heard.
In countries where democratic political campaigns are publicly financed, they think we've been crazy to have been allowing big money to dominate our process as much as it already does. But then, people in those same countries also think we're crazy to have a health-care system driven by the profit motive, essentially run by Big Insurance and Big Pharm. For a country generally considered to have resurrected the democratic-republican form of government from antiquity, we now seem to be lagging very far behind the serious practitioners.
Political history tends to run in cycles of reform and reaction. The U.S. seemed to be just emerging from an overlong period of reaction, giving progressives hope that a long period of reform, similar to those of the past, was getting under way.
This decision, it appears, is going to give the forces of reaction the power to drown civic reform in the bathtub long before it gets started this time, if you will pardon my paraphrasing of Grover Norquist.
I honestly don't see much hope after this -- unless the American people, at long last, wise up. I stopped holding my breath on that one a very long time ago.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Things I Don't Miss About 'The Good Old Days'
By Manifesto Joe
Today, every left-leaning blogger and their dog is posting reverently about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement and how we, of course, still have a long way to go toward losing racism in America.
As has been my lifelong custom, I'm going to be the odd man out and post on something mostly nonpolitical.
Recently, I posted on the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation, the often spoiled beginnings of the Baby Boomers, and how those generations' later years, perhaps justly, are being marked by equally sharp contrasts of prosperity and poverty.
To make amends to Boomers, here's a small salute to them: The '60s and '70s brought many changes that I appreciate. Here's a litany of all the things I definitely don't miss about "the good old days" of the Greatest Generation.
-- Hair oil/tonic. Brylcreem (A little dab'l do ya) and Vitalis seemed to be the leaders in this market. Brylcreem at least didn't smell a lot. But it was plenty greasy (I've speculated that this was Elvis' choice). ("Use more -- if you dare!... She'll love to run her fingers through your hair.") Hell, as a kid trying that stuff out, I hated to scratch my own head and get my fingers oily. Then there was Vitalis -- less greasy, but with a stench that they must have searched the world over for. Perhaps it's my own peculiar sense of smell, but it always reeked of rancid alcohol base to me. Around 1967-68, when longer hair and "the dry look" came in where I was living as a kid, it was a big relief.
-- After-shave. As late as 1978, as I was starting out as a newspaper reporter, I was assigned to attend functions in which I would meet with older men, pillars of the community, and interview them. Of course, I had to shake their hands, as is the custom. Damn. Many of them used sick-sweet stuff like Aqua Velva in the morning, and it was their habit not to wash their hands after splashing some on. So they shared it with everyone they touched. After shaking hands, I'm like -- ugh. I've been slimed. My hand smells like a French whorehouse.
-- Old-fashioned barbershops. For two big reasons that I don't miss them, see items 1 and 2. But also, there were the traditional barbers. My experiences with them weren't very positive. One in my hometown was an alcoholic who would habitually drink before cutting hair. One time he cut off a small piece of a kid's ear. Then there was a skinny little guy, nicknamed "Hippo," who turned out to be pimping on the side. He shot himself in the head just before local cops were about to arrest him.
-- Heavy makeup and weekly beauty parlor visits for women. I confess that, after 30 years of looking at sheepdog permanents, floppy ties, androgynous fashions, short hairstyles, etc., as a red-blooded American male I miss the old Vargas girl look of the 1940s. But -- no thanks to rouge, or foundation. And the last time I had to enter a traditional beauty shop, on assignment around '83, I almost asphyxiated on the fumes. You still see an older woman now and then with one of those once-a-week hairstyles. I feel like asking, "Who does your coif? Brillo, or SOS?"
-- Segregation. OK, I'm going to get a little MLK-Day preaching in after all. When I was a kid going to the local cinema for Saturday afternoon matinees, it was as wide-open there as the Wild West, except for one thing. The few black kids who lived in our town had to watch the movies from the balcony. The theater owner was some fossil who lived in a nearby town, and this was his edict. I found it strange that, as a racist, he didn't care whether Hispanic kids sat down in the prime seats. And in our town, Hispanics were the majority. (I strongly suspect that was why he tolerated them. He realized that he had to get the asses in the seats -- absolutely no pun intended.) He had singled out blacks. And this was around 1968, a few years after this practice had been outlawed. There were holdouts in states like Texas, for years. I certainly don't miss seeing that sort of injustice.
-- Black-and-white TV, with two or three channels. This was all I saw until I was 16, when PBS started a UHF station near us. Not that TV is so great now, even with 100-plus channels courtesy of cable or satellite. And color and screen size are cosmetic/aesthetic -- content is a little more important to me. But I remember the boredom of Saturday and Sunday afternoons home from school, and having to choose from among wrestling, bowling, mediocre old movies, Marlin Perkins' Wild Kingdom (sponsored by Mutual of Omaha) and local polka bands. And that was absolutely it. I suppose it was good for childhood fitness. It encouraged kids to go outside and play.
-- Box fans, with no air conditioning. Here in Texas, summers are brutal. I've never gotten used to them, even after decades. When I went away to college at age 18, I lived in a dormitory with AC. It was my first live-in experience with it. Going home summers was miserable after that, until my mother finally decided that the family could afford a couple of window units.
-- Cigarette commercials. 1970 was the last year they were on TV. I confess, I was once an addict, and I have unmodern compassion for the holdouts. They seem almost like an oppressed minority to me. But the commercials, I didn't miss, even when I was still chaining Camels or Marlboros in the '70s. I especially loathed the ones with those imbecilic jingles. ("You can take Salem out of the country, but ..." And then, the Virginia Slims feminist pitch: "You've got your own cigarette now, baby! You've come a long, long way.")
Is it too obvious to point out that George Harrison died of lung cancer?
-- Red Skelton. A rather unfunny, clownish TV comic who was always laughing hysterically at his own stale gags.
But Heartland America adored him.
To wrap up, with all due respect to what's left of the Greatest Generation, "the good old days" weren't all that friggin' good in my memory. I've come to love much of the music of yore, much more than I ever thought I would. But I wouldn't trade my living conditions now for most of it back then. Here's a little salute to my fellow Boomers, who take some of the changes for granted, thankfully.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Today, every left-leaning blogger and their dog is posting reverently about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement and how we, of course, still have a long way to go toward losing racism in America.
As has been my lifelong custom, I'm going to be the odd man out and post on something mostly nonpolitical.
Recently, I posted on the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation, the often spoiled beginnings of the Baby Boomers, and how those generations' later years, perhaps justly, are being marked by equally sharp contrasts of prosperity and poverty.
To make amends to Boomers, here's a small salute to them: The '60s and '70s brought many changes that I appreciate. Here's a litany of all the things I definitely don't miss about "the good old days" of the Greatest Generation.
-- Hair oil/tonic. Brylcreem (A little dab'l do ya) and Vitalis seemed to be the leaders in this market. Brylcreem at least didn't smell a lot. But it was plenty greasy (I've speculated that this was Elvis' choice). ("Use more -- if you dare!... She'll love to run her fingers through your hair.") Hell, as a kid trying that stuff out, I hated to scratch my own head and get my fingers oily. Then there was Vitalis -- less greasy, but with a stench that they must have searched the world over for. Perhaps it's my own peculiar sense of smell, but it always reeked of rancid alcohol base to me. Around 1967-68, when longer hair and "the dry look" came in where I was living as a kid, it was a big relief.
-- After-shave. As late as 1978, as I was starting out as a newspaper reporter, I was assigned to attend functions in which I would meet with older men, pillars of the community, and interview them. Of course, I had to shake their hands, as is the custom. Damn. Many of them used sick-sweet stuff like Aqua Velva in the morning, and it was their habit not to wash their hands after splashing some on. So they shared it with everyone they touched. After shaking hands, I'm like -- ugh. I've been slimed. My hand smells like a French whorehouse.
-- Old-fashioned barbershops. For two big reasons that I don't miss them, see items 1 and 2. But also, there were the traditional barbers. My experiences with them weren't very positive. One in my hometown was an alcoholic who would habitually drink before cutting hair. One time he cut off a small piece of a kid's ear. Then there was a skinny little guy, nicknamed "Hippo," who turned out to be pimping on the side. He shot himself in the head just before local cops were about to arrest him.
-- Heavy makeup and weekly beauty parlor visits for women. I confess that, after 30 years of looking at sheepdog permanents, floppy ties, androgynous fashions, short hairstyles, etc., as a red-blooded American male I miss the old Vargas girl look of the 1940s. But -- no thanks to rouge, or foundation. And the last time I had to enter a traditional beauty shop, on assignment around '83, I almost asphyxiated on the fumes. You still see an older woman now and then with one of those once-a-week hairstyles. I feel like asking, "Who does your coif? Brillo, or SOS?"
-- Segregation. OK, I'm going to get a little MLK-Day preaching in after all. When I was a kid going to the local cinema for Saturday afternoon matinees, it was as wide-open there as the Wild West, except for one thing. The few black kids who lived in our town had to watch the movies from the balcony. The theater owner was some fossil who lived in a nearby town, and this was his edict. I found it strange that, as a racist, he didn't care whether Hispanic kids sat down in the prime seats. And in our town, Hispanics were the majority. (I strongly suspect that was why he tolerated them. He realized that he had to get the asses in the seats -- absolutely no pun intended.) He had singled out blacks. And this was around 1968, a few years after this practice had been outlawed. There were holdouts in states like Texas, for years. I certainly don't miss seeing that sort of injustice.
-- Black-and-white TV, with two or three channels. This was all I saw until I was 16, when PBS started a UHF station near us. Not that TV is so great now, even with 100-plus channels courtesy of cable or satellite. And color and screen size are cosmetic/aesthetic -- content is a little more important to me. But I remember the boredom of Saturday and Sunday afternoons home from school, and having to choose from among wrestling, bowling, mediocre old movies, Marlin Perkins' Wild Kingdom (sponsored by Mutual of Omaha) and local polka bands. And that was absolutely it. I suppose it was good for childhood fitness. It encouraged kids to go outside and play.
-- Box fans, with no air conditioning. Here in Texas, summers are brutal. I've never gotten used to them, even after decades. When I went away to college at age 18, I lived in a dormitory with AC. It was my first live-in experience with it. Going home summers was miserable after that, until my mother finally decided that the family could afford a couple of window units.
-- Cigarette commercials. 1970 was the last year they were on TV. I confess, I was once an addict, and I have unmodern compassion for the holdouts. They seem almost like an oppressed minority to me. But the commercials, I didn't miss, even when I was still chaining Camels or Marlboros in the '70s. I especially loathed the ones with those imbecilic jingles. ("You can take Salem out of the country, but ..." And then, the Virginia Slims feminist pitch: "You've got your own cigarette now, baby! You've come a long, long way.")
Is it too obvious to point out that George Harrison died of lung cancer?
-- Red Skelton. A rather unfunny, clownish TV comic who was always laughing hysterically at his own stale gags.
But Heartland America adored him.
To wrap up, with all due respect to what's left of the Greatest Generation, "the good old days" weren't all that friggin' good in my memory. I've come to love much of the music of yore, much more than I ever thought I would. But I wouldn't trade my living conditions now for most of it back then. Here's a little salute to my fellow Boomers, who take some of the changes for granted, thankfully.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Sergeant Stubby, USMC: A Forgotten American Hero
By Manifesto Joe
A blogosphere friend of mine, SJ of Random Thoughts, has made a post showing how dogs often know that a crisis is imminent before humans do. Their senses are keener than ours in many ways. In this case, it was knowing that a strong earthquake was coming shortly before it did.
It seemed like a good time to point out that one of the greatest American heroes of World War I was U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant Stubby, an American pit bull terrier mix.
Here's the full Wikipedia article on ol' Sarge, who was found wandering around the Yale University campus sometime around 1917, the year that the U.S. entered the war. He became maybe the top U.S. hero of WWI; well, next to Sergeant York, who had the advantage of walking around on two legs.
This is from the Wiki article:
After being gassed himself, Stubby learned to warn his unit of poison gas attacks, located wounded soldiers in no man's land, and — since he could hear the whine of incoming artillery shells before humans could — became very adept at letting his unit know when to duck for cover. He was even solely responsible for capturing a German spy in the Argonne.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Friday, January 15, 2010
With Haiti Remarks, Herr Scumbaugh Is Clearly Without Shame
By Manifesto Joe
Lots of other people are having a go at this septic bag of pig diarrhea, so I'll take my turn, too.
Just when you figure that Herr Rush Scumbaugh, court jester for the Fourth Reich, has reached the limits of his audacity, he comes up with something worse. This time it was an "observation" right after one of the worst natural disasters of modern times, the earthquake in Haiti.
Here's what Herr Scumbaugh said, according to usnews.com:
This will play right into Obama's hands. He's humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, "credibility" with the black community--in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It's made-to-order for them. That's why he couldn't wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there.
Lard-ass also went on to discourage people from giving to the Red Cross for disaster relief. His reason was that with foreign aid, Americans have already donated to Haiti -- "it's called the U.S. income tax."
This comes as thousands of Haitians are still trapped in rubble, and thousands more are desperate and probably dying.
If this boorish flippancy doesn't at last demolish any last vestige of credibility that this bellowing tub of guts has even among lard-line -- oh, I meant hard-line right-wingers -- then there's nothing that can. Those who continue to listen to and absorb this excrement can only be described as part of a not-very-crypto neo-Nazi movement in America.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Lots of other people are having a go at this septic bag of pig diarrhea, so I'll take my turn, too.
Just when you figure that Herr Rush Scumbaugh, court jester for the Fourth Reich, has reached the limits of his audacity, he comes up with something worse. This time it was an "observation" right after one of the worst natural disasters of modern times, the earthquake in Haiti.
Here's what Herr Scumbaugh said, according to usnews.com:
This will play right into Obama's hands. He's humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, "credibility" with the black community--in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It's made-to-order for them. That's why he couldn't wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there.
Lard-ass also went on to discourage people from giving to the Red Cross for disaster relief. His reason was that with foreign aid, Americans have already donated to Haiti -- "it's called the U.S. income tax."
This comes as thousands of Haitians are still trapped in rubble, and thousands more are desperate and probably dying.
If this boorish flippancy doesn't at last demolish any last vestige of credibility that this bellowing tub of guts has even among lard-line -- oh, I meant hard-line right-wingers -- then there's nothing that can. Those who continue to listen to and absorb this excrement can only be described as part of a not-very-crypto neo-Nazi movement in America.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
A Tribute To The Great Clifford Brown (1930-1956)
This was one of the most tragic losses for the jazz world. Brownie was actually a clean-living dude, not like some of the wounded geniuses who passed before him. He died in a car wreck, and he wasn't even driving.
Listen up, hepcats: from Blue Note, Planet 1953. The number's called Hymn of the Orient ...
Go to YouTube for details. But I'll throw in that on drums is the most legendary Art Blakey (1919-1990).
Listen up, hepcats: from Blue Note, Planet 1953. The number's called Hymn of the Orient ...
Go to YouTube for details. But I'll throw in that on drums is the most legendary Art Blakey (1919-1990).
Monday, January 11, 2010
Pig Nation 2: Do 'Freegans' Have An Answer To Food Waste?
By Manifesto Joe
The day after Thanksgiving, I put up a post that generally got good responses, but special vitriol from one person who questioned the science involved. The crux was that, according to one recent study, 40 percent of all food produced in the U.S. is wasted, enough to feed tens of millions of people across a hungry planet.
There has been more than one exhaustive study that came to such conclusions. And, a sad aspect is that most of the waste, perhaps 60 percent, is by individual Americans. The other 40 percent is said to be about equally divided between bad production practices and distribution waste.
In the November post, I emphasized the guilt of individuals. But there's evidently also a great deal of absurd waste built into the capitalist system itself. How does one fight this?
After that post, my wife told me about a group of Americans I'd never heard of before: "Freegans."
Who are the Freegans?
These are folks who, for reasons of thrift, but often more of conscience, do their best not to exchange money for food, and live largely off the waste of a profligate system. Here's one of their links.
As you will see from this site, Freeganism involves more than salvaging food. The bottom line is, why send a perfectly usable consumer item of any kind to a landfill?
Something I realized after reading up on this is that I've been sort of an amateur Freegan for most of my life, and so was my mother. If there was something she couldn't use, for one reason or another, be it food, toothpaste, etc., she was always giving it to me or my wife. At work, I'm always the one who, after some Thanksgiving or Christmas office orgy, is putting the perishables in the nearest refrigerator and planning my lunch, and hopefully that of a few other employees, for the next couple of days.
Freegans aren't always vegans, although some are. I probably would never be able to go full time as one, because I like dead animal flesh too much. But, Freeganism does encourage vegetarian eating in an important way: Meat spoils quickly. Not so with veggies, or even cheese. I never understood why so many people don't know that, when cheese acquires mold, they can just scrape the moldy surface off and eat the rest quite safely.
Bohemian tradition
One practice associated with Freegans, going back to 1960s hippies and older bohemian movements, is "Dumpster-diving." The Wikipedia article on this has some discussion of the practice.
This made me realize that my wife has been sort of an amateur Freegan for most of her life as well. Earlier in our marriage, when we would be out and about, she would Dumpster-dive -- not for food, but for all kinds of other perfectly useful items. She says she once found a small fortune in sunglasses and reading glasses in a Dumpster behind an optical shop, and gave many of them away, since obviously she couldn't use but a few pairs. These things weren't discarded en masse because they weren't good anymore. They were just no longer fashionable.
In New York, Freegans are very well-organized, and they've discovered that supermarkets and food production centers are sources of enough wasted food to feed countless people. It's not a mystery, once you think about it: several eggplants or bell peppers that have bad spots on them, but would be made edible with a simple pocketknife; canned goods that are a month past their expiration date; tortillas that were tossed by the factory because they weren't perfectly round; for that matter, baked goods of all kinds that have similar imperfections.
The possibilities are almost endless, once you consider all the food and other consumer stuff that goes into U.S. Dumpsters, then into landfills -- that is, if enterprising Freegans don't step in first.
An alternative to consumerism
So, what of the consumer economy? We're taught, practically brainwashed, from early in life that spending is the engine that drives the American way. But we're 5 percent of the world's population, using perhaps 25 percent of its resources. Oink, oink?
And we're learning slowly, too slowly, that our planet is vulnerable, and that the way we live individually and locally makes a big collective difference.
And this lifestyle change really doesn't mean having to give up most of what we enjoy. I don't know if I can produce this link right now, so I'm not going to try. But I read that at a recent Freegan Christmas party somewhere in the Village, guests feasted on gourmet cheeses and crackers for appetizers, then all sat down to a big helping of eggplant Parmigiana and an ample tossed salad, all salvaged from U.S. food waste.
The Aussies seem to be getting into this excellent habit, too, and this article offers good tips from Down Under.
I am the first to admit that, being a Texan, and a native South Texan, who savors dead animal flesh for dinner and juevos rancheros y jamon for breakfast, I know I will never be a faithful, practicing, full-time Freegan. Hell, I even love menudo. But this movement involves principles that we can all learn from, and live by. Judging from what I've seen in America, even a confirmed carnivore like me has a good head start.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
The day after Thanksgiving, I put up a post that generally got good responses, but special vitriol from one person who questioned the science involved. The crux was that, according to one recent study, 40 percent of all food produced in the U.S. is wasted, enough to feed tens of millions of people across a hungry planet.
There has been more than one exhaustive study that came to such conclusions. And, a sad aspect is that most of the waste, perhaps 60 percent, is by individual Americans. The other 40 percent is said to be about equally divided between bad production practices and distribution waste.
In the November post, I emphasized the guilt of individuals. But there's evidently also a great deal of absurd waste built into the capitalist system itself. How does one fight this?
After that post, my wife told me about a group of Americans I'd never heard of before: "Freegans."
Who are the Freegans?
These are folks who, for reasons of thrift, but often more of conscience, do their best not to exchange money for food, and live largely off the waste of a profligate system. Here's one of their links.
As you will see from this site, Freeganism involves more than salvaging food. The bottom line is, why send a perfectly usable consumer item of any kind to a landfill?
Something I realized after reading up on this is that I've been sort of an amateur Freegan for most of my life, and so was my mother. If there was something she couldn't use, for one reason or another, be it food, toothpaste, etc., she was always giving it to me or my wife. At work, I'm always the one who, after some Thanksgiving or Christmas office orgy, is putting the perishables in the nearest refrigerator and planning my lunch, and hopefully that of a few other employees, for the next couple of days.
Freegans aren't always vegans, although some are. I probably would never be able to go full time as one, because I like dead animal flesh too much. But, Freeganism does encourage vegetarian eating in an important way: Meat spoils quickly. Not so with veggies, or even cheese. I never understood why so many people don't know that, when cheese acquires mold, they can just scrape the moldy surface off and eat the rest quite safely.
Bohemian tradition
One practice associated with Freegans, going back to 1960s hippies and older bohemian movements, is "Dumpster-diving." The Wikipedia article on this has some discussion of the practice.
This made me realize that my wife has been sort of an amateur Freegan for most of her life as well. Earlier in our marriage, when we would be out and about, she would Dumpster-dive -- not for food, but for all kinds of other perfectly useful items. She says she once found a small fortune in sunglasses and reading glasses in a Dumpster behind an optical shop, and gave many of them away, since obviously she couldn't use but a few pairs. These things weren't discarded en masse because they weren't good anymore. They were just no longer fashionable.
In New York, Freegans are very well-organized, and they've discovered that supermarkets and food production centers are sources of enough wasted food to feed countless people. It's not a mystery, once you think about it: several eggplants or bell peppers that have bad spots on them, but would be made edible with a simple pocketknife; canned goods that are a month past their expiration date; tortillas that were tossed by the factory because they weren't perfectly round; for that matter, baked goods of all kinds that have similar imperfections.
The possibilities are almost endless, once you consider all the food and other consumer stuff that goes into U.S. Dumpsters, then into landfills -- that is, if enterprising Freegans don't step in first.
An alternative to consumerism
So, what of the consumer economy? We're taught, practically brainwashed, from early in life that spending is the engine that drives the American way. But we're 5 percent of the world's population, using perhaps 25 percent of its resources. Oink, oink?
And we're learning slowly, too slowly, that our planet is vulnerable, and that the way we live individually and locally makes a big collective difference.
And this lifestyle change really doesn't mean having to give up most of what we enjoy. I don't know if I can produce this link right now, so I'm not going to try. But I read that at a recent Freegan Christmas party somewhere in the Village, guests feasted on gourmet cheeses and crackers for appetizers, then all sat down to a big helping of eggplant Parmigiana and an ample tossed salad, all salvaged from U.S. food waste.
The Aussies seem to be getting into this excellent habit, too, and this article offers good tips from Down Under.
I am the first to admit that, being a Texan, and a native South Texan, who savors dead animal flesh for dinner and juevos rancheros y jamon for breakfast, I know I will never be a faithful, practicing, full-time Freegan. Hell, I even love menudo. But this movement involves principles that we can all learn from, and live by. Judging from what I've seen in America, even a confirmed carnivore like me has a good head start.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
For Greatest Generation, Rags To Riches; For Boomers, Riches To Rags?
By Manifesto Joe
I suppose one could call it poetic justice. And, keep in mind that I'm dealing in the broadest generalizations. But it looks as though America has seen and is seeing two very different generations, parents and children, facing inverted experiences.
The Greatest Generation (roughly 1901-1924) had hardscrabble beginnings. The oldest of these Americans were in the prime of life when the stock market crashed and the worst economic depression of modern times began. The youngest of them were children. The ones in the middle were about the age when you graduate from high school. Many saw dreams of college, businesses, and the better life those might bring, utterly destroyed.
We, the Baby Boomers, are mostly children of the Greatest Generation, at least one parent or the other. We're defined demographically as 1946-1964; culturally (Strauss & Howe, Generations, 1990) as more like 1943-1960, with the defining feature that we all came of age between 1960 and 1979, a unique, distinctive time.
There couldn't have been two generations in American history with more strikingly different experiences. The Greatest got their collective butt kicked early in life, first with the Great Depression and then World War II. From the latter, some didn't come back. Those who did came out of those experiences a cautious, culturally conservative group. Levittown homes. Eisenhower lawns. 2.3 kids and a dog. Get a job for life. Marry your hometown sweetheart and stay married for life. Church every Sunday. The favored investment: savings bonds (The war's over, dude!)
The Boomers? The contrast was incredible. I'm not going to say "we," because I wasn't entirely typical of my generation. But I went to college with enough people who were that I recognize the type.
They grew up during the cushiest times ever. The period of 1945-1973 is generally seen by economists as the time of ultimate American hegenomy. They were shielded from the harsher realities by their parents, who had definitely not been spared such experiences.
Their generation's war was Vietnam, a morally ambiguous, nasty quagmire that young men generally went out of their way to avoid. Contrast that with "The Good War," the one almost everyone agreed had to be fought and won, unconditionally.
Culture went very far left during the Boomer time. Have casual sex with different partners. Forget what your mama said, smoke that funny-smelling cigarette. Question authority. In fact, defy it. Listen to harsh music, to hell with that sweet, syrupy old stuff of your parents'. College is such a given, hell, why not just drop out and go back later, any old time you decide you're ready? We're all going to get old and die someday. So, let's get high, and let's get laid!
It's not that all of the above is entirely wrong -- but with 20/20 hindsight, it's just a little naive. People have to work, grow food and such. To do that, they have to be sober at least some of the time. Women occasionally get knocked up from sex, and it's a good idea for the kid to know, who's your daddy? Authority figures are indeed usually full of shit, but try it on yourself. You may sense fecal matter coming out of your own mouth at some point.
Now, after The Great Recession, and the semi-collapse of American prosperity, the Boomers face interesting poetic justice.
The Greatest came of age with poverty. As a generation, they seemed to turn it into a character-building passage. The Boomers, most of whom never tasted much if any poverty in youth, are now confronted with it.
One source estimates that since The Great Recession began, unemployment for 55-and-older workers has jumped 143 percent. This seems strange, considering that "futurist" projections back in that innocent time we now call the Nineties said that older workers were going to be needed more than ever by now.
The "futurists" were full of it about a lot of things. I recall their projections from even earlier. We were supposed to be working 25-hour weeks by now, and robots were supposed to be taking up more than enough of the slack. So it shouldn't surprise us that they were oh-so-wrong yet again.
A stereotypical lefty blogger post about this would be to decry the obvious discrimination against older workers; and, I ain't a fella to let you down. (Henry Fonda as Tom Joad will come back from the dead to get me for that.) Here's a petition you can sign to start fighting back against the misery we Boomers suddenly face.
But, back to the rest of the post: I try to avoid the stereotypical in this blog, so humor me. Perhaps there's something karmic in all this. We Boomers caused our parents a huge amount of grief, so maybe we're facing just desserts.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
I suppose one could call it poetic justice. And, keep in mind that I'm dealing in the broadest generalizations. But it looks as though America has seen and is seeing two very different generations, parents and children, facing inverted experiences.
The Greatest Generation (roughly 1901-1924) had hardscrabble beginnings. The oldest of these Americans were in the prime of life when the stock market crashed and the worst economic depression of modern times began. The youngest of them were children. The ones in the middle were about the age when you graduate from high school. Many saw dreams of college, businesses, and the better life those might bring, utterly destroyed.
We, the Baby Boomers, are mostly children of the Greatest Generation, at least one parent or the other. We're defined demographically as 1946-1964; culturally (Strauss & Howe, Generations, 1990) as more like 1943-1960, with the defining feature that we all came of age between 1960 and 1979, a unique, distinctive time.
There couldn't have been two generations in American history with more strikingly different experiences. The Greatest got their collective butt kicked early in life, first with the Great Depression and then World War II. From the latter, some didn't come back. Those who did came out of those experiences a cautious, culturally conservative group. Levittown homes. Eisenhower lawns. 2.3 kids and a dog. Get a job for life. Marry your hometown sweetheart and stay married for life. Church every Sunday. The favored investment: savings bonds (The war's over, dude!)
The Boomers? The contrast was incredible. I'm not going to say "we," because I wasn't entirely typical of my generation. But I went to college with enough people who were that I recognize the type.
They grew up during the cushiest times ever. The period of 1945-1973 is generally seen by economists as the time of ultimate American hegenomy. They were shielded from the harsher realities by their parents, who had definitely not been spared such experiences.
Their generation's war was Vietnam, a morally ambiguous, nasty quagmire that young men generally went out of their way to avoid. Contrast that with "The Good War," the one almost everyone agreed had to be fought and won, unconditionally.
Culture went very far left during the Boomer time. Have casual sex with different partners. Forget what your mama said, smoke that funny-smelling cigarette. Question authority. In fact, defy it. Listen to harsh music, to hell with that sweet, syrupy old stuff of your parents'. College is such a given, hell, why not just drop out and go back later, any old time you decide you're ready? We're all going to get old and die someday. So, let's get high, and let's get laid!
It's not that all of the above is entirely wrong -- but with 20/20 hindsight, it's just a little naive. People have to work, grow food and such. To do that, they have to be sober at least some of the time. Women occasionally get knocked up from sex, and it's a good idea for the kid to know, who's your daddy? Authority figures are indeed usually full of shit, but try it on yourself. You may sense fecal matter coming out of your own mouth at some point.
Now, after The Great Recession, and the semi-collapse of American prosperity, the Boomers face interesting poetic justice.
The Greatest came of age with poverty. As a generation, they seemed to turn it into a character-building passage. The Boomers, most of whom never tasted much if any poverty in youth, are now confronted with it.
One source estimates that since The Great Recession began, unemployment for 55-and-older workers has jumped 143 percent. This seems strange, considering that "futurist" projections back in that innocent time we now call the Nineties said that older workers were going to be needed more than ever by now.
The "futurists" were full of it about a lot of things. I recall their projections from even earlier. We were supposed to be working 25-hour weeks by now, and robots were supposed to be taking up more than enough of the slack. So it shouldn't surprise us that they were oh-so-wrong yet again.
A stereotypical lefty blogger post about this would be to decry the obvious discrimination against older workers; and, I ain't a fella to let you down. (Henry Fonda as Tom Joad will come back from the dead to get me for that.) Here's a petition you can sign to start fighting back against the misery we Boomers suddenly face.
But, back to the rest of the post: I try to avoid the stereotypical in this blog, so humor me. Perhaps there's something karmic in all this. We Boomers caused our parents a huge amount of grief, so maybe we're facing just desserts.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Landmarq: There's Something Wrong With The World When The Record Companies Can't Sell A Band This Fantastic
http://www.lastfm.es/music/Landmarq/_/Mountains+Of+Anglia?setlang=esClick here.
Vocalist: Tracy Hitchings
Vocalist: Tracy Hitchings
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
From Joe's Vault: On Natural Monopolies
Joe's been kicking back a little during the holidays, but an old post seems relevant now in light of the health care debate. And, having noticed that Texans are now paying much higher electric rates than our neighbors are, even after we deregulated, this seems all the more relevant. From Sept. 28, 2007:
By Manifesto Joe
The late Molly Ivins once wrote something to the effect that after a service is deregulated, the result is that people often discover why it was regulated in the first place.
For 30 years, the "Priesthood of the Free Market" has been hellbent to sell Americans on the deregulation and privatization of damn near everything. Their progress has been astonishing. Even the Iraq war seems to have been about half outsourced.
After considering the deregulation of the electricity market, I am inclined to look beyond the "true believers" of the free market, and toward those whose only true belief is in maximization of profits, no matter the cost to anyone else. Remember the story of the Trojan Horse?
But the tide may finally be turning. It appears that many officials in states where electricity has been deregulated (about a third have done so) have come to similar conclusions as the late Molly.
The Sept. 21 online edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported:
Support for electric deregulation has dramatically fallen among the nation's utility regulators, with one-third in deregulated states expressing the likelihood of some sort of re-regulation, according to a new survey.
Conducted in conjunction with Standard & Poor's, the telephone survey of 96 state utility regulators also showed a plurality answering "none" when asked which states operate the most successful deregulated market. ...
Tim Morstad, an analyst with AARP-Texas ... said the poll should some as no surprise to anyone who pays a light bill in Texas. ...
"The rest of the country is figuring out what Texas consumers already know, that deregulation fails to deliver lower rates and better service," he said. ...
The survey also found that 43 percent of regulators in states with deregulation say it does not work well, and 37 percent said it does. Moreover, 54 percent of regulators in states with deregulation report that re-regulation is likely.
Texas is far from the only state where ratepayers have seen this kind of deception. This is from an article carried by The Associated Press in April:
BENTON, Ill. --This wasn't supposed to happen with deregulation. Electric bills were supposed to go down. Instead, Ellie Dorchincez can almost see the dollars evaporating every time she turns on the lights or opens the freezer at her small Farm Fresh grocery store.
Her electric bill, which used to be about $800 a month, has jumped to $1,800. ...
The cause of her distress is a common problem: the failure of deregulation to deliver its promise of lower electricity prices. In many states, it's had the opposite effect with sharply higher rates -- 72 percent in Maryland, up to 50 percent in Illinois.
Not one of the 16 states -- plus the District of Columbia -- that have pushed forward with deregulation since the late 1990s can call it a success. In fact, consumers in those states fared worse than residents in states that stuck with a policy of regulating their power industries.
An Associated Press analysis of federal data shows consumers in the 17 deregulated areas paid an average of 30 percent more for power in 2006 than their counterparts in regulated states. That's up from a 24 percent gap in 1990.
The idea was to move from a monopoly situation to robust competition for electric customers, with backers promising potentially lower rates in state after state. ...
But competition, especially for residential and small business customers, rarely emerged. ...
Consumer groups ... say deregulation has had a chance to prove itself. In Texas, for example, competition did develop after rate caps ended -- but the energy prices remained higher.
In Robert Kuttner's now-classic 1998 book Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limitations of Markets, the economist wrote (p. 228):
We regulate some industries because they work more efficiently as monopolies. It would be wasteful and duplicative to have two parallel gas pipelines, two sets of telephone poles, two parallel rail lines, or two electric grids. Neither supplier could cover his costs by running at half-capacity, and both would soon have to raise prices or go out of business. Left alone, one would likely absorb the other. ...
Once we tolerate a monopoly, the producer is no longer subject to the discipline of competition. ... in principle the consumer is free not to buy the product. But in many natural monopolies, such as electricity, water, and transit, the product is a virtual necessity, and consumer demand is fairly inelastic; hence the consumer cannot discipline the monopolist.
Enter those godless socialists, the regulators. But I suspect that by now there are many God-fearing ratepayers in Texas and many other states who wish to God they had those crypto-Marxists back.
I reluctantly stuck with Reliant Energy here in the Lone Star State, in part just to see what they would do after the latest phase of deregulation. You know, like, to test the classical economic theory. Silly me. I went from paying 13.3 cents per kilowatt hour to 14.5 cents -- and the latter during the worst heat of the Texas summer. I'm certain, of course, that this was just a coincidence. I'm nevertheless switching to a "competitor" -- but not holding my breath for much improvement.
I posted this comment on a great blog, Red Hog Diary, about the health-care issue. But I think it also says a bit about natural monopolies that is salient:
A good incision sometimes works wonders. I'm going to try one.
The crucial thing so many seem to miss, and that populations of every developed country other than the U.S. have eventually understood, is that health care isn't a sector of the economy that is governed by a classical market mechanism. It's mostly what is termed a natural monopoly.
There are circumstances when one can make certain consumer choices. But if you've ever been picked up by an ambulance in what seemed like a life-threatening situation, you're not going to be able to shop around for the best room rates at the hospitals. Not if you want to live. Once you're in a hospital, you have to take it pretty much the way they offer it. It ain't like showing up at a flea market, haggling with the merchants like an Arab trader.
What I see is a fundamental mistake of people trying to apply classical economics to a sector that has never -- ever -- shown the appropriate characteristics for that. The rest of the world understands this. Even if they bitch about the particulars of their government systems, ask yourself why they aren't moving toward any emulation of ours.
Although I digress a bit -- these "thinkers" make the same mistake with utility deregulation. Where I live, under deregulation, I'm paying considerably more for electrical power now. It is another example of a natural monopoly. I can't play off two electrical grids against each other for lower rates, any more than I can do that between hospitals when I'm sick.
And, of course, I'm paying more for health care. Much, much more, outpacing inflation. Every passing year. And more for electricity. And more for medicine ... Get the picture?
I shouldn't leave this subject without noting that there is evidence of considerable chicanery by utility corporations left in charge of the proverbial henhouse. This is from an April 11 article in the online edition of the San Antonio Express-News:
Last week, TXU executives, facing a $210 million state fine for alleged price manipulations in the summer of 2005, threatened to withhold power by shutting down natural-gas-powered electricity plants if the allegations were not dropped.
That's so Enron. That kind of abusive management mentality went out of style with the Enron implosion of 2001. (It did? -- MJ)
The group of investors trying to buy TXU had to scold the TXU executives into withdrawing the threat a few days later. The executives' capitulation indicates that the potential buyers are deciding policy at TXU headquarters these days.
I have no argument whatsoever with market approaches that are genuinely competitive, socially responsible and deliver the goods in the best possible way. Ideally, the relationship between markets and governments is symbiotic: governments providing the infrastructure markets depend on to thrive, and strong markets supplying governments with the tax base they need in order to deliver on their end. Government entities can be maddeningly inefficient, but I've worked for large corporations that seemed to be trying to compete with them on that score.
This is how the prosperous economies of developed countries have really been built -- with a mixed system. (This World Wide Web: courtesy of the government. Look it up.)
As economist Kuttner wrote:
Faith in idealized market structures also has spawned a political jihad intent upon stripping away the community and governmental safeguards against market abuses and imperfections -- safeguards that are essential to the modern American system constructed during the Great Depression and after World War II. In addition, an overtly and proudly selfish ideology finances and propels the drive to cut taxes on the wealthy, punch holes in the social safety net, and "unchain" business from the shackles of regulation and litigation. The conservative catechism castigates those who would "reward need" by supporting public programs for the poor and, at its most radical, even rejects Adam Smith's conviction that the state must provide the bedrock of the educational and physical infrastructure of an industrialized society.
Plainly, utilities are usually natural monopolies, and Americans were ripped off en masse when the "Priesthood" sold so many on electric deregulation.
The corporate Trojan Horse is inside the gates, but it's not too late to drag it back out. It's just a shame that we the people, and more importantly our lawmakers, have to keep "relearning" these hard lessons.
R.I.P., Dear Molly. You saw this coming years ago, and you told us so.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
By Manifesto Joe
The late Molly Ivins once wrote something to the effect that after a service is deregulated, the result is that people often discover why it was regulated in the first place.
For 30 years, the "Priesthood of the Free Market" has been hellbent to sell Americans on the deregulation and privatization of damn near everything. Their progress has been astonishing. Even the Iraq war seems to have been about half outsourced.
After considering the deregulation of the electricity market, I am inclined to look beyond the "true believers" of the free market, and toward those whose only true belief is in maximization of profits, no matter the cost to anyone else. Remember the story of the Trojan Horse?
But the tide may finally be turning. It appears that many officials in states where electricity has been deregulated (about a third have done so) have come to similar conclusions as the late Molly.
The Sept. 21 online edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported:
Support for electric deregulation has dramatically fallen among the nation's utility regulators, with one-third in deregulated states expressing the likelihood of some sort of re-regulation, according to a new survey.
Conducted in conjunction with Standard & Poor's, the telephone survey of 96 state utility regulators also showed a plurality answering "none" when asked which states operate the most successful deregulated market. ...
Tim Morstad, an analyst with AARP-Texas ... said the poll should some as no surprise to anyone who pays a light bill in Texas. ...
"The rest of the country is figuring out what Texas consumers already know, that deregulation fails to deliver lower rates and better service," he said. ...
The survey also found that 43 percent of regulators in states with deregulation say it does not work well, and 37 percent said it does. Moreover, 54 percent of regulators in states with deregulation report that re-regulation is likely.
Texas is far from the only state where ratepayers have seen this kind of deception. This is from an article carried by The Associated Press in April:
BENTON, Ill. --This wasn't supposed to happen with deregulation. Electric bills were supposed to go down. Instead, Ellie Dorchincez can almost see the dollars evaporating every time she turns on the lights or opens the freezer at her small Farm Fresh grocery store.
Her electric bill, which used to be about $800 a month, has jumped to $1,800. ...
The cause of her distress is a common problem: the failure of deregulation to deliver its promise of lower electricity prices. In many states, it's had the opposite effect with sharply higher rates -- 72 percent in Maryland, up to 50 percent in Illinois.
Not one of the 16 states -- plus the District of Columbia -- that have pushed forward with deregulation since the late 1990s can call it a success. In fact, consumers in those states fared worse than residents in states that stuck with a policy of regulating their power industries.
An Associated Press analysis of federal data shows consumers in the 17 deregulated areas paid an average of 30 percent more for power in 2006 than their counterparts in regulated states. That's up from a 24 percent gap in 1990.
The idea was to move from a monopoly situation to robust competition for electric customers, with backers promising potentially lower rates in state after state. ...
But competition, especially for residential and small business customers, rarely emerged. ...
Consumer groups ... say deregulation has had a chance to prove itself. In Texas, for example, competition did develop after rate caps ended -- but the energy prices remained higher.
In Robert Kuttner's now-classic 1998 book Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limitations of Markets, the economist wrote (p. 228):
We regulate some industries because they work more efficiently as monopolies. It would be wasteful and duplicative to have two parallel gas pipelines, two sets of telephone poles, two parallel rail lines, or two electric grids. Neither supplier could cover his costs by running at half-capacity, and both would soon have to raise prices or go out of business. Left alone, one would likely absorb the other. ...
Once we tolerate a monopoly, the producer is no longer subject to the discipline of competition. ... in principle the consumer is free not to buy the product. But in many natural monopolies, such as electricity, water, and transit, the product is a virtual necessity, and consumer demand is fairly inelastic; hence the consumer cannot discipline the monopolist.
Enter those godless socialists, the regulators. But I suspect that by now there are many God-fearing ratepayers in Texas and many other states who wish to God they had those crypto-Marxists back.
I reluctantly stuck with Reliant Energy here in the Lone Star State, in part just to see what they would do after the latest phase of deregulation. You know, like, to test the classical economic theory. Silly me. I went from paying 13.3 cents per kilowatt hour to 14.5 cents -- and the latter during the worst heat of the Texas summer. I'm certain, of course, that this was just a coincidence. I'm nevertheless switching to a "competitor" -- but not holding my breath for much improvement.
I posted this comment on a great blog, Red Hog Diary, about the health-care issue. But I think it also says a bit about natural monopolies that is salient:
A good incision sometimes works wonders. I'm going to try one.
The crucial thing so many seem to miss, and that populations of every developed country other than the U.S. have eventually understood, is that health care isn't a sector of the economy that is governed by a classical market mechanism. It's mostly what is termed a natural monopoly.
There are circumstances when one can make certain consumer choices. But if you've ever been picked up by an ambulance in what seemed like a life-threatening situation, you're not going to be able to shop around for the best room rates at the hospitals. Not if you want to live. Once you're in a hospital, you have to take it pretty much the way they offer it. It ain't like showing up at a flea market, haggling with the merchants like an Arab trader.
What I see is a fundamental mistake of people trying to apply classical economics to a sector that has never -- ever -- shown the appropriate characteristics for that. The rest of the world understands this. Even if they bitch about the particulars of their government systems, ask yourself why they aren't moving toward any emulation of ours.
Although I digress a bit -- these "thinkers" make the same mistake with utility deregulation. Where I live, under deregulation, I'm paying considerably more for electrical power now. It is another example of a natural monopoly. I can't play off two electrical grids against each other for lower rates, any more than I can do that between hospitals when I'm sick.
And, of course, I'm paying more for health care. Much, much more, outpacing inflation. Every passing year. And more for electricity. And more for medicine ... Get the picture?
I shouldn't leave this subject without noting that there is evidence of considerable chicanery by utility corporations left in charge of the proverbial henhouse. This is from an April 11 article in the online edition of the San Antonio Express-News:
Last week, TXU executives, facing a $210 million state fine for alleged price manipulations in the summer of 2005, threatened to withhold power by shutting down natural-gas-powered electricity plants if the allegations were not dropped.
That's so Enron. That kind of abusive management mentality went out of style with the Enron implosion of 2001. (It did? -- MJ)
The group of investors trying to buy TXU had to scold the TXU executives into withdrawing the threat a few days later. The executives' capitulation indicates that the potential buyers are deciding policy at TXU headquarters these days.
I have no argument whatsoever with market approaches that are genuinely competitive, socially responsible and deliver the goods in the best possible way. Ideally, the relationship between markets and governments is symbiotic: governments providing the infrastructure markets depend on to thrive, and strong markets supplying governments with the tax base they need in order to deliver on their end. Government entities can be maddeningly inefficient, but I've worked for large corporations that seemed to be trying to compete with them on that score.
This is how the prosperous economies of developed countries have really been built -- with a mixed system. (This World Wide Web: courtesy of the government. Look it up.)
As economist Kuttner wrote:
Faith in idealized market structures also has spawned a political jihad intent upon stripping away the community and governmental safeguards against market abuses and imperfections -- safeguards that are essential to the modern American system constructed during the Great Depression and after World War II. In addition, an overtly and proudly selfish ideology finances and propels the drive to cut taxes on the wealthy, punch holes in the social safety net, and "unchain" business from the shackles of regulation and litigation. The conservative catechism castigates those who would "reward need" by supporting public programs for the poor and, at its most radical, even rejects Adam Smith's conviction that the state must provide the bedrock of the educational and physical infrastructure of an industrialized society.
Plainly, utilities are usually natural monopolies, and Americans were ripped off en masse when the "Priesthood" sold so many on electric deregulation.
The corporate Trojan Horse is inside the gates, but it's not too late to drag it back out. It's just a shame that we the people, and more importantly our lawmakers, have to keep "relearning" these hard lessons.
R.I.P., Dear Molly. You saw this coming years ago, and you told us so.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
On Health Care: For Democrats, The Glass Is Half-Full; For Republicans, 'The Glass Is Mine'
By Manifesto Joe
Two votes down, one to go. It now looks certain that the maximum-diluted, piss-poor Senate version of "health care reform" will pass, and that some sort of conference-approved bill will make it to Barack Obama's desk.
There's not much meaningful left in the bill -- but something is better than nothing. Despite unhappiness among people like me, those who would heartily favor national single-payer, there are now no dissenters among the 60 Senate votes in the Democrats' bloc. Even Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has described himself as a socialist, has apparently decided that this beats the status quo.
I'm not even a socialist; I'm a Keynesian. Yet my first instinct about this was to say, hell no. Then I thought some more.
There are some reasons why all 40 Senate Republicans are voting, as a bloc, against this. The denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, one of the most heinous of the insurance companies' practices, would be banned. An estimated 30 million Americans would be able to get shitty private health insurance, with subsidies for those who can't afford it. SOMEBODY with plenty of juice doesn't want this passed -- they're just thankful that it wasn't real, far-reaching reform.
The Republicans, typically disingenuous, are doing a lot of posturing and posing on what they depict as a moral high ground. In a rare moment of genuine wit, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called the Medicaid deals that were perhaps cut for Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-La.) vote "The Louisiana Purchase."
Good for a chuckle, but come now -- Republicans never cut any deals like that to get legislation passed? It was recalled among TV journalists, at least those who actually possess memories, that Texas' own Tom "Twinkle Toes" DeLay, back in his infamous days as The Hammer of the House, came under fire for cutting deals like that in order to get the necessary votes for passage of Medicare drug coverage.
Granted, we've had some stinky bloodwurst made here, but a certain number of human lives will be saved because of it.
And, the issue won't go away. Monopoly insurers and Big Pharm are still screwing millions upon millions of us, with big profits going to their stockholders. I've been through the mill with them at workplaces -- Aetna, Blue Cross-Blue Shield, United HealthCare, etc. -- ostensibly competitors, but they certainly don't do price competition. Your employer is typically under contract for a calendar year. And, if they go to the expense and hassle of switching providers, they get pretty much the same deal from the "competition." Take it or leave it, MFs.
Something is better than nothing. In 1965, Medicare was passed for the growing population 65 and older. It's in trouble now because people don't want to pay the taxes to support it, and because crooked providers often find ways to bilk the system. But my wife and I have both been caretakers for sick, elderly people. I say, go ahead and cuss that single-payer Medicare system all you want -- that is, until you need it. Then it becomes something you can't figure out how people ever did without. I've got a big hint for those folks -- look at U.S. life expectancy, pre-1965 and post-1965. (And we're not even one of the best countries in that department -- about 42nd. Want to guess why that is?)
I repeat, something is better than nothing. LBJ couldn't get single-payer for all Americans through Congress. So he and the Democrats of the time (hey, and even a few Republicans, back when that party had moderates) did what they could do.
The fight for real reform is some years away. I'd hoped that, amid what is being called The Great Recession, enough people had become uncomfortable enough to have an epiphany -- that throughout the rest of the developed world, even conservatives realize that health care shouldn't be dominated by the profit motive.
But not quite enough people became that uncomfortable, and even some who did interpreted their pain in a back-asswards way, deciding that their taxes are too high while remarkably oblivious about their premiums and co-payments. And of course, the lobbies for Big Pharm and Big Insurance are the best that money can buy.
Some 56 senators, plus four who apparently had to be bought, are apparently going to deliver something, as opposed to nothing. So, let's get on with it, and see what tomorrow brings. Happy holidays.
Some related links:
Economist Robert Reich pretty much sums up my sentiments about this health care debacle. We're definitely on the same page.
The most magnificent Keith Olbermann sums up my initial reaction to this outcome. My source of disagreement is that, at 53, my days of idealism are long past.
And finally, Big Pharm has opened up a whole new door to obscene profits by doping up little kids, as well as their parents, with psychiatric drugs.
Break out that eggnog -- the real stuff. That's a much older panacea, and it probably won't kill you any quicker. Season's greetings.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Two votes down, one to go. It now looks certain that the maximum-diluted, piss-poor Senate version of "health care reform" will pass, and that some sort of conference-approved bill will make it to Barack Obama's desk.
There's not much meaningful left in the bill -- but something is better than nothing. Despite unhappiness among people like me, those who would heartily favor national single-payer, there are now no dissenters among the 60 Senate votes in the Democrats' bloc. Even Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has described himself as a socialist, has apparently decided that this beats the status quo.
I'm not even a socialist; I'm a Keynesian. Yet my first instinct about this was to say, hell no. Then I thought some more.
There are some reasons why all 40 Senate Republicans are voting, as a bloc, against this. The denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, one of the most heinous of the insurance companies' practices, would be banned. An estimated 30 million Americans would be able to get shitty private health insurance, with subsidies for those who can't afford it. SOMEBODY with plenty of juice doesn't want this passed -- they're just thankful that it wasn't real, far-reaching reform.
The Republicans, typically disingenuous, are doing a lot of posturing and posing on what they depict as a moral high ground. In a rare moment of genuine wit, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called the Medicaid deals that were perhaps cut for Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-La.) vote "The Louisiana Purchase."
Good for a chuckle, but come now -- Republicans never cut any deals like that to get legislation passed? It was recalled among TV journalists, at least those who actually possess memories, that Texas' own Tom "Twinkle Toes" DeLay, back in his infamous days as The Hammer of the House, came under fire for cutting deals like that in order to get the necessary votes for passage of Medicare drug coverage.
Granted, we've had some stinky bloodwurst made here, but a certain number of human lives will be saved because of it.
And, the issue won't go away. Monopoly insurers and Big Pharm are still screwing millions upon millions of us, with big profits going to their stockholders. I've been through the mill with them at workplaces -- Aetna, Blue Cross-Blue Shield, United HealthCare, etc. -- ostensibly competitors, but they certainly don't do price competition. Your employer is typically under contract for a calendar year. And, if they go to the expense and hassle of switching providers, they get pretty much the same deal from the "competition." Take it or leave it, MFs.
Something is better than nothing. In 1965, Medicare was passed for the growing population 65 and older. It's in trouble now because people don't want to pay the taxes to support it, and because crooked providers often find ways to bilk the system. But my wife and I have both been caretakers for sick, elderly people. I say, go ahead and cuss that single-payer Medicare system all you want -- that is, until you need it. Then it becomes something you can't figure out how people ever did without. I've got a big hint for those folks -- look at U.S. life expectancy, pre-1965 and post-1965. (And we're not even one of the best countries in that department -- about 42nd. Want to guess why that is?)
I repeat, something is better than nothing. LBJ couldn't get single-payer for all Americans through Congress. So he and the Democrats of the time (hey, and even a few Republicans, back when that party had moderates) did what they could do.
The fight for real reform is some years away. I'd hoped that, amid what is being called The Great Recession, enough people had become uncomfortable enough to have an epiphany -- that throughout the rest of the developed world, even conservatives realize that health care shouldn't be dominated by the profit motive.
But not quite enough people became that uncomfortable, and even some who did interpreted their pain in a back-asswards way, deciding that their taxes are too high while remarkably oblivious about their premiums and co-payments. And of course, the lobbies for Big Pharm and Big Insurance are the best that money can buy.
Some 56 senators, plus four who apparently had to be bought, are apparently going to deliver something, as opposed to nothing. So, let's get on with it, and see what tomorrow brings. Happy holidays.
Some related links:
Economist Robert Reich pretty much sums up my sentiments about this health care debacle. We're definitely on the same page.
The most magnificent Keith Olbermann sums up my initial reaction to this outcome. My source of disagreement is that, at 53, my days of idealism are long past.
And finally, Big Pharm has opened up a whole new door to obscene profits by doping up little kids, as well as their parents, with psychiatric drugs.
Break out that eggnog -- the real stuff. That's a much older panacea, and it probably won't kill you any quicker. Season's greetings.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Friday, December 18, 2009
A Quote That Sums Up Right-Wing Health Care Idiocy
"Keep your government hands off my Medicare!"
-- Speaker at a South Carolina town-hall meeting, July 2009.
Source: The Yale Book of Quotations, 2009 edition -- MJ
-- Speaker at a South Carolina town-hall meeting, July 2009.
Source: The Yale Book of Quotations, 2009 edition -- MJ
Monday, December 14, 2009
Paul Samuelson, 1915-2009: A Loss In A Time Of Economic Illiteracy
By Manifesto Joe
Paul A. Samuelson, America's first Nobel laureate in economics, died Sunday at his Massachusetts home at age 94. He had lived long and accomplished great things, so I wouldn't normally have taken much note of his passing.
But Dr. Samuelson represents the passing of more than just one person. This was perhaps the last great economist who saw firsthand the transformation of American capitalism, and he went on to profoundly change the way many academics approach the discipline.
However, his passing is especially disheartening when one surveys the U.S. landscape and sees how little change his innovative thinking has wrought on Main Street, where Tea Baggers bandy the word "socialism" about without being able to accurately or adequately define it.
Dr. Samuelson was not a socialist, but rather a Keynesian, heavily influenced by British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). Like Keynes, Dr. Samuelson was not seeking an end to private ownership of the means of production. Keynes regarded Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867) as an obsolete text, and far from an adequate prescription to end modern capitalism's shortcomings.
Where both Keynes and later Dr. Samuelson broke with the classical school of economics was on the role of government in finance, trade and the general welfare. Simplistic people on the economic right commonly mislabel this activist/interventionist approach as "socialism," but that's because they don't even know what socialism is. (See my previous post for the Webster's definition.) Mere income redistribution isn't "socialism" -- any time a government entity changes tax policy, subsidizes something, or appropriates public money for any purpose, income is redistributed. It is simply a question of to whom -- and historically, it has more often been the rich who benefited.
The Keynesian school is one that Dr. Samuelson popularized at least to some degree with his seminal Economics textbook (19 editions, first published in 1948).
The New York Times obituary for Dr. Samuelson contains a couple of paragraphs that sum up this peaceful revolution well:
The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong push from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to restore them. Many economics students would never again rest comfortably with the 19th-century view that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention.
That lesson was reinforced in 2008, when the international economy slipped into the steepest downturn since the Great Depression, when Keynesian economics was born. When the Depression began, governments stood pat or made matters worse by trying to balance fiscal budgets and erecting trade barriers. But 80 years later, having absorbed the Keynesian teaching of Mr. Samuelson and his followers, most industrialized countries took corrective action, raising government spending, cutting taxes, keeping exports and imports flowing and driving short-term interest rates to near zero.
What the economic semiliterates of the right have failed to understand, generation after generation, was that government activism didn't harm capitalism. On the contrary, it rescued it from a time, around 1932, when the old approach was on its knees and the ref was counting. In the U.S., there were delays and powerful opponents (sound familiar?), but eventually the new approach ushered in our greatest era of growth and prosperity to date, 1945-73, ended only by OPEC's first oil embargo.
Dr. Samuelson's basic text has sold about 4 million copies to date. Back in the early '90s I worked for the publishing house that was doing the revised editions, and it was still one of the most widely adopted textbooks in the country.
Sadly, both Keynes and Dr. Samuelson left much work to be done. The concept of a mixed economy is standard throughout much of the developed world, but still lost on many Americans. I still encounter people, otherwise educated, who think in terms of "free market" versus "command economy," not comprehending the fundamental logical fallacy of such an "either/or" notion.
It isn't "socialism" when governments intervene to mitigate capitalism's once-devastating boom-and-bust cycles. Dr. Samuelson once described the prosperity wrought by laissez-faire as a fragile flower indeed -- the busts can devastate many millions of lives. In the modern economic era, our booms have perhaps been more modest than in the roller-coaster days of the 1920s, but our busts have been commensurately less painful. Even the reactionary Bush II administration, confronted with a potential global economic meltdown, resorted to -- gasp -- Keynesian intervention to avert a repeat of the 1929-33 disaster.
But this year's Tea Party spectacle demonstrates how little has been learned in America, in spite of Dr. Samuelson's life work. As many people as there must be out there who took freshman economics with Dr. Samuelson's book as the course text -- well, there are many antidotes to education, such as cheating, lazy professors and teaching assistants, and just the human habit of reverting, postcollegiate, to the brainwashing of a conservatard home.
The best tribute that nonsocialist progressives can give Dr. Samuelson is to spread the word. This isn't socialism -- it's capitalism tempered by uncommon sense.
A revealing postscript from Dr. Samuelson: "It is not too much to say that the widespread creation of dictatorships and the resulting World War II stemmed in no small measure from the world's failure to meet this basic economic problem [the Great Depression] adequately."
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Paul A. Samuelson, America's first Nobel laureate in economics, died Sunday at his Massachusetts home at age 94. He had lived long and accomplished great things, so I wouldn't normally have taken much note of his passing.
But Dr. Samuelson represents the passing of more than just one person. This was perhaps the last great economist who saw firsthand the transformation of American capitalism, and he went on to profoundly change the way many academics approach the discipline.
However, his passing is especially disheartening when one surveys the U.S. landscape and sees how little change his innovative thinking has wrought on Main Street, where Tea Baggers bandy the word "socialism" about without being able to accurately or adequately define it.
Dr. Samuelson was not a socialist, but rather a Keynesian, heavily influenced by British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). Like Keynes, Dr. Samuelson was not seeking an end to private ownership of the means of production. Keynes regarded Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867) as an obsolete text, and far from an adequate prescription to end modern capitalism's shortcomings.
Where both Keynes and later Dr. Samuelson broke with the classical school of economics was on the role of government in finance, trade and the general welfare. Simplistic people on the economic right commonly mislabel this activist/interventionist approach as "socialism," but that's because they don't even know what socialism is. (See my previous post for the Webster's definition.) Mere income redistribution isn't "socialism" -- any time a government entity changes tax policy, subsidizes something, or appropriates public money for any purpose, income is redistributed. It is simply a question of to whom -- and historically, it has more often been the rich who benefited.
The Keynesian school is one that Dr. Samuelson popularized at least to some degree with his seminal Economics textbook (19 editions, first published in 1948).
The New York Times obituary for Dr. Samuelson contains a couple of paragraphs that sum up this peaceful revolution well:
The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong push from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to restore them. Many economics students would never again rest comfortably with the 19th-century view that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention.
That lesson was reinforced in 2008, when the international economy slipped into the steepest downturn since the Great Depression, when Keynesian economics was born. When the Depression began, governments stood pat or made matters worse by trying to balance fiscal budgets and erecting trade barriers. But 80 years later, having absorbed the Keynesian teaching of Mr. Samuelson and his followers, most industrialized countries took corrective action, raising government spending, cutting taxes, keeping exports and imports flowing and driving short-term interest rates to near zero.
What the economic semiliterates of the right have failed to understand, generation after generation, was that government activism didn't harm capitalism. On the contrary, it rescued it from a time, around 1932, when the old approach was on its knees and the ref was counting. In the U.S., there were delays and powerful opponents (sound familiar?), but eventually the new approach ushered in our greatest era of growth and prosperity to date, 1945-73, ended only by OPEC's first oil embargo.
Dr. Samuelson's basic text has sold about 4 million copies to date. Back in the early '90s I worked for the publishing house that was doing the revised editions, and it was still one of the most widely adopted textbooks in the country.
Sadly, both Keynes and Dr. Samuelson left much work to be done. The concept of a mixed economy is standard throughout much of the developed world, but still lost on many Americans. I still encounter people, otherwise educated, who think in terms of "free market" versus "command economy," not comprehending the fundamental logical fallacy of such an "either/or" notion.
It isn't "socialism" when governments intervene to mitigate capitalism's once-devastating boom-and-bust cycles. Dr. Samuelson once described the prosperity wrought by laissez-faire as a fragile flower indeed -- the busts can devastate many millions of lives. In the modern economic era, our booms have perhaps been more modest than in the roller-coaster days of the 1920s, but our busts have been commensurately less painful. Even the reactionary Bush II administration, confronted with a potential global economic meltdown, resorted to -- gasp -- Keynesian intervention to avert a repeat of the 1929-33 disaster.
But this year's Tea Party spectacle demonstrates how little has been learned in America, in spite of Dr. Samuelson's life work. As many people as there must be out there who took freshman economics with Dr. Samuelson's book as the course text -- well, there are many antidotes to education, such as cheating, lazy professors and teaching assistants, and just the human habit of reverting, postcollegiate, to the brainwashing of a conservatard home.
The best tribute that nonsocialist progressives can give Dr. Samuelson is to spread the word. This isn't socialism -- it's capitalism tempered by uncommon sense.
A revealing postscript from Dr. Samuelson: "It is not too much to say that the widespread creation of dictatorships and the resulting World War II stemmed in no small measure from the world's failure to meet this basic economic problem [the Great Depression] adequately."
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Conservatives Don't Even Know What Socialism Is
This is from Webster's New World College Dictionary, Third Edition:
socialism: 1 any of various theories or systems of the ownership and operation of the means of production and distribution by society or the community rather than by private individuals, with all members of society or the community sharing in the work and the products
The key words there are "ownership" and "means of production." Income redistribution is not part of the definition.
Now for the video portion of our program:
I love the smell of napalmed right-wing ass in the morning. -- MJ
socialism: 1 any of various theories or systems of the ownership and operation of the means of production and distribution by society or the community rather than by private individuals, with all members of society or the community sharing in the work and the products
The key words there are "ownership" and "means of production." Income redistribution is not part of the definition.
Now for the video portion of our program:
I love the smell of napalmed right-wing ass in the morning. -- MJ
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Misgivings About Obama's Afghanistan Policy
By Manifesto Joe
After several days to ruminate on the matter, I still find myself in a state of utter ambivalence about President Obama's decision to ramp up the Afghanistan war. I want this president to succeed -- but I faintly smell napalm in the morning, and I don't love that smell. This involvement is beginning to look a lot like a small-scale Vietnam with sand and mountains.
Although I have what I believe is a healthy skepticism about war in general, I'm no pacifist. My left knee doesn't jerk every single time the U.S. embarks upon military action. But there are just enough Vietnam parallels to make this a bit disturbing.
First, the Differences
There are contrasts between this action and the invasion -- yep, I said invasion -- of Vietnam. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong never attacked Americans on our own soil -- ever. One could argue that neither did the Taliban. But they harbored people who did -- namely, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
I would characterize the initial U.S. assault on the Taliban as justified, as does Obama. It's just a shame that the Bush-ordered action didn't result in a quick knockout (the capture or killing of bin Laden), and that opened the door for all kinds of international mischief by the Il Doofus administration, most tragically the Iraq invasion.
In contrast, I would characterize the U.S. invasion of Vietnam as virtually a rogue action, with little justification at its core. I have concluded this largely with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, without hindsight, many if not most Americans wore blinders about 'Nam. Obstructing vision on one side was the Domino Theory, which now looks like nonsense. Blocking the other side was the notion of a monolithic communist threat, the idea that a commie is a commie is a commie. That's no more true than a fascist is a fascist is a fascist, or a capitalist is a capitalist is a capitalist. Any broadly drawn political or economic ideology will contain within it some diversity, even conflict.
The assumption in Vietnam was that a communist there was the same as a Soviet one, or a Chinese one. And of course, a common view during the Cold War was that any and all communists must be opposed, at any cost and regardless of ethics. We largely know now, 40 years later, that some communist regimes were expansionist, while others were not and are not now.
Around 1946, Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh actually approached the U.S. for support, with an appeal to our sense of independence and self-determination. He was ignored, and we backed the French colonialists in that war. In 1954, with the French in defeat, the Geneva Accord called for a plebiscite for eventual reunification of Vietnam. The U.S. opposed and ultimately blocked that vote -- because it was sincerely feared that Ho would WIN. So much for democracy and self-determination of peoples.
The U.S. involvement in Vietnam was fatally flawed from the beginning. I don't believe that to be the case in Afghanistan, where arguably, a much more clear and present danger was lurking, and the leader of our enemy would never have invoked the name of George Washington, as did Ho.
Here's Where the Involvements Start to Look Alike
-- In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, we're fighting seasoned guerrillas who have fought multiple foes, generationally, and prevailed because of the simple fact that they wouldn't quit. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong lost every major battle, and it's estimated that about 3 million Vietnamese died during the U.S. involvement. Yet they fought on, against us and many of their own people. It eventually became too expensive for the invaders to sustain their effort.
-- Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is a place that has been historically untenable for any occupiers, all the way back to Alexander the Great. The British and the Soviets found the place equally inhospitable. Can the U.S. expect a different result?
-- The Karzai "government" bears more than a passing resemblance to the corrupt General Thieu regime in South Vietnam. With friends like that, it was harder to fight the enemy. And yet, we expect to establish a strong, democratic and relatively honest central government in a place that has never known one?
Again, I want the Obama presidency to succeed. The U.S. is just starting to emerge from 28 years of political reaction. Obama's success is crucial for keeping America from lurching back into the stupor of the Reagan/Bush/Gingrich/Bush II years.
But I fear he's in a no-win situation. He's escalating, and if it doesn't "work" soon, the Republicans will hammer him. If he had refused to do so and started a gradual withdrawal, there's a serious danger that the Taliban would eventually retake Kabul, and Obama would certainly be blamed for that and characterized as weak.
Since I can't be less ambivalent about this, I'll wrap up. My hope is that, seemingly against the odds indicated by history, Obama can somehow have the U.S. emerge from this involvement relatively unmuddied, and with our re-energized progressive movement still intact. He has my very, very reluctant support.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
After several days to ruminate on the matter, I still find myself in a state of utter ambivalence about President Obama's decision to ramp up the Afghanistan war. I want this president to succeed -- but I faintly smell napalm in the morning, and I don't love that smell. This involvement is beginning to look a lot like a small-scale Vietnam with sand and mountains.
Although I have what I believe is a healthy skepticism about war in general, I'm no pacifist. My left knee doesn't jerk every single time the U.S. embarks upon military action. But there are just enough Vietnam parallels to make this a bit disturbing.
First, the Differences
There are contrasts between this action and the invasion -- yep, I said invasion -- of Vietnam. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong never attacked Americans on our own soil -- ever. One could argue that neither did the Taliban. But they harbored people who did -- namely, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
I would characterize the initial U.S. assault on the Taliban as justified, as does Obama. It's just a shame that the Bush-ordered action didn't result in a quick knockout (the capture or killing of bin Laden), and that opened the door for all kinds of international mischief by the Il Doofus administration, most tragically the Iraq invasion.
In contrast, I would characterize the U.S. invasion of Vietnam as virtually a rogue action, with little justification at its core. I have concluded this largely with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, without hindsight, many if not most Americans wore blinders about 'Nam. Obstructing vision on one side was the Domino Theory, which now looks like nonsense. Blocking the other side was the notion of a monolithic communist threat, the idea that a commie is a commie is a commie. That's no more true than a fascist is a fascist is a fascist, or a capitalist is a capitalist is a capitalist. Any broadly drawn political or economic ideology will contain within it some diversity, even conflict.
The assumption in Vietnam was that a communist there was the same as a Soviet one, or a Chinese one. And of course, a common view during the Cold War was that any and all communists must be opposed, at any cost and regardless of ethics. We largely know now, 40 years later, that some communist regimes were expansionist, while others were not and are not now.
Around 1946, Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh actually approached the U.S. for support, with an appeal to our sense of independence and self-determination. He was ignored, and we backed the French colonialists in that war. In 1954, with the French in defeat, the Geneva Accord called for a plebiscite for eventual reunification of Vietnam. The U.S. opposed and ultimately blocked that vote -- because it was sincerely feared that Ho would WIN. So much for democracy and self-determination of peoples.
The U.S. involvement in Vietnam was fatally flawed from the beginning. I don't believe that to be the case in Afghanistan, where arguably, a much more clear and present danger was lurking, and the leader of our enemy would never have invoked the name of George Washington, as did Ho.
Here's Where the Involvements Start to Look Alike
-- In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, we're fighting seasoned guerrillas who have fought multiple foes, generationally, and prevailed because of the simple fact that they wouldn't quit. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong lost every major battle, and it's estimated that about 3 million Vietnamese died during the U.S. involvement. Yet they fought on, against us and many of their own people. It eventually became too expensive for the invaders to sustain their effort.
-- Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is a place that has been historically untenable for any occupiers, all the way back to Alexander the Great. The British and the Soviets found the place equally inhospitable. Can the U.S. expect a different result?
-- The Karzai "government" bears more than a passing resemblance to the corrupt General Thieu regime in South Vietnam. With friends like that, it was harder to fight the enemy. And yet, we expect to establish a strong, democratic and relatively honest central government in a place that has never known one?
Again, I want the Obama presidency to succeed. The U.S. is just starting to emerge from 28 years of political reaction. Obama's success is crucial for keeping America from lurching back into the stupor of the Reagan/Bush/Gingrich/Bush II years.
But I fear he's in a no-win situation. He's escalating, and if it doesn't "work" soon, the Republicans will hammer him. If he had refused to do so and started a gradual withdrawal, there's a serious danger that the Taliban would eventually retake Kabul, and Obama would certainly be blamed for that and characterized as weak.
Since I can't be less ambivalent about this, I'll wrap up. My hope is that, seemingly against the odds indicated by history, Obama can somehow have the U.S. emerge from this involvement relatively unmuddied, and with our re-energized progressive movement still intact. He has my very, very reluctant support.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Pig Nation: Americans Waste 40 Percent Of Food Produced Here
By Manifesto Joe
Here's a day-after-Thanksgiving thought. According to a new study, 40 percent of all food produced in the United States is thrown out. The waste, per person, has gone up by 50 percent since 1974.
Here's the news link.
It's bad enough to have wasted 26 or 27 percent of U.S. food back in '74 -- that's ridiculous, considering how many people in the world were hungry then. The amount of hunger is at least as bad nowadays, and stands to get worse with climate change.
As much swinelike behavior as there is in America, what with people rushing into retail stores to trample the help to death on "Black Friday" (see my posts of about this time last year), this seems to me the most criminally swinelike thing of all.
It would be hard to believe that people act like this if it wasn't so evident in public situations. Where I work, we have a community refrigerator, and one has to be careful using it because of the quantity of leftovers, and even the newly purchased food, that is forgotten, sits in the box for weeks, and rots. Some of us there are vigilantes, throwing out spoiled food to make room for the fresh and get rid of the rancid smells. But, this has to be a large number of our employees who are guilty of this negligence, because the problem is so pervasive, stubborn and recurrent.
For one thing, with the U.S. economy in the tank as it is, it's astonishing that a lot of people even think they can afford to be so wasteful. Most Americans only 75 years ago, during the Great Depression, wouldn't have dreamed of it. What kind of transformation has happened, in what is historically such a short time?
Perhaps there is some cultural element involved. I haven't had a lot of experience with people from other cultures, but what I've seen gives me the impression that they eat leftovers and try not to overbuy. "It's a sin to waste food," I once heard a young woman from Germany say.
Why do I feel this way about it, as a baby boomer, a member of the most pampered generation in American history?
Well, I wasn't typical of my generation. My folks weren't well-off to begin with, and my dad got sick with a terminal illness and had to go on disability when I was 11. Food simply wasn't wasted in our house unless it was so far-gone as to be a health risk.
I remember eating a lot of hamburger, cheap chicken, pasta, potatoes, canned tuna, salmon patties, white-trash beans and cornbread, canned or frozen vegetables and fruit, homemade sandwiches, stew and such -- steak was a rare Sunday luxury. Fish? Other than what came out of cans, that was Mrs. Paul's sticks with some ketchup, or occasionally some catfish that my grandfather caught in a nearby lake.
Leftovers were refrigerated and eaten the next day. There was a lot of cold cereal and skim milk for breakfast. Our vegetables often came from a large backyard garden. This was South Texas -- for a time we had a big orange tree in the back yard, and it was my job get up on the tree and pick the oranges for fresh juice.
It wasn't quite the Depression during my small-town '60s childhood. I never went hungry, and no, I never had to walk more than maybe a third of a mile to school. But the lesson was never lost on me that one should never, ever take eating for granted.
I suppose there's no way to legally bust the kind of piglike hominids who commit this waste, but it could certainly be made into something socially unacceptable. With all the social pressure that's been brought to bear on the slinking minority that U.S. cigarette addicts have become, one would think that this wouldn't be a very hard follow-up.
If it were up to me, I'd make it something thought of as on a par with drunken driving or domestic violence. It does unspeakable harm to many -- but the perpetrators aren't compelled to look upon their victims in court, or in the morgue.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Here's a day-after-Thanksgiving thought. According to a new study, 40 percent of all food produced in the United States is thrown out. The waste, per person, has gone up by 50 percent since 1974.
Here's the news link.
It's bad enough to have wasted 26 or 27 percent of U.S. food back in '74 -- that's ridiculous, considering how many people in the world were hungry then. The amount of hunger is at least as bad nowadays, and stands to get worse with climate change.
As much swinelike behavior as there is in America, what with people rushing into retail stores to trample the help to death on "Black Friday" (see my posts of about this time last year), this seems to me the most criminally swinelike thing of all.
It would be hard to believe that people act like this if it wasn't so evident in public situations. Where I work, we have a community refrigerator, and one has to be careful using it because of the quantity of leftovers, and even the newly purchased food, that is forgotten, sits in the box for weeks, and rots. Some of us there are vigilantes, throwing out spoiled food to make room for the fresh and get rid of the rancid smells. But, this has to be a large number of our employees who are guilty of this negligence, because the problem is so pervasive, stubborn and recurrent.
For one thing, with the U.S. economy in the tank as it is, it's astonishing that a lot of people even think they can afford to be so wasteful. Most Americans only 75 years ago, during the Great Depression, wouldn't have dreamed of it. What kind of transformation has happened, in what is historically such a short time?
Perhaps there is some cultural element involved. I haven't had a lot of experience with people from other cultures, but what I've seen gives me the impression that they eat leftovers and try not to overbuy. "It's a sin to waste food," I once heard a young woman from Germany say.
Why do I feel this way about it, as a baby boomer, a member of the most pampered generation in American history?
Well, I wasn't typical of my generation. My folks weren't well-off to begin with, and my dad got sick with a terminal illness and had to go on disability when I was 11. Food simply wasn't wasted in our house unless it was so far-gone as to be a health risk.
I remember eating a lot of hamburger, cheap chicken, pasta, potatoes, canned tuna, salmon patties, white-trash beans and cornbread, canned or frozen vegetables and fruit, homemade sandwiches, stew and such -- steak was a rare Sunday luxury. Fish? Other than what came out of cans, that was Mrs. Paul's sticks with some ketchup, or occasionally some catfish that my grandfather caught in a nearby lake.
Leftovers were refrigerated and eaten the next day. There was a lot of cold cereal and skim milk for breakfast. Our vegetables often came from a large backyard garden. This was South Texas -- for a time we had a big orange tree in the back yard, and it was my job get up on the tree and pick the oranges for fresh juice.
It wasn't quite the Depression during my small-town '60s childhood. I never went hungry, and no, I never had to walk more than maybe a third of a mile to school. But the lesson was never lost on me that one should never, ever take eating for granted.
I suppose there's no way to legally bust the kind of piglike hominids who commit this waste, but it could certainly be made into something socially unacceptable. With all the social pressure that's been brought to bear on the slinking minority that U.S. cigarette addicts have become, one would think that this wouldn't be a very hard follow-up.
If it were up to me, I'd make it something thought of as on a par with drunken driving or domestic violence. It does unspeakable harm to many -- but the perpetrators aren't compelled to look upon their victims in court, or in the morgue.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
An Unusual Thanksgiving Wish, Courtesy Of Al Green
While you're digesting all that turkey, dressing and cranberry sauce today, take a few minutes to dance off some calories, courtesy of the most righteous and soulful Rev. Al Green.
And give thanks that you live in a country with so much multicultural wealth.
Take Me to the River, by Al Green (1946 - ), circa 1974
And give thanks that you live in a country with so much multicultural wealth.
Take Me to the River, by Al Green (1946 - ), circa 1974
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
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