Bainport: Shipping Jobs to China

There is no more vivid example of Romney hypocrisy (well, perhaps I shouldn’t say that; Romney’s campaign consists almost wholly of hypocrisy) than what’s been happening in Freeport, IL at the Bain Capital-owned Sensata plant. Sensata makes automobile parts like sensors—you know for the American car industry that Romney thought should be jettisoned. And its owner, Bain Capital (hence the name protesting workers have given to Freeport: Bainport) has recently decided that it’s moving the whole plant, lock, stock, and barrel, (without its workers, of course) to China. But, you may say, Romney has vowed countless times that he’ll be “tougher” on China than Obama, and that he’s going to be moving millions of jobs back to the U.S.A. In the realm of action, though, what the company he founded and used to head, and in which he still owns major stock, is doing is shipping the whole thing to China (where wages are an average 85% lower). You can read about this on a great website, www.bainport.com, which has all kinds of goodies, including a just-released documentary on the whole ugly story.

            I heard about it this morning on Philip Muldaury’s show on KPFA, and it really is ugly. Not only are these capitalist swine moving the whole company to China, but before doing so, they brought Chinese workers to Freeport to be trained by the very Americans they are going to replace. The American workers had no choice but to train their Chinese successors because if they didn’t, they were threatened with firing right away, which would then lose them their unemployment compensation. What I also heard, and then read about on bainport.com, was that many of the company’s workers have refused to take this lying down. They’ve established picket lines and started a whole series of actions (including a protest to the National Labor Relations Board) to try to stop the move. So far, it hasn’t worked, but it has certainly pointed to the massive hypocrisy in the entire Romney rationale for being President (watch what I say, not what I do). Said one protester—retired plumber Paul Holz, who was arrested, American flag in hand, for demonstrating outside Sensata:

            "I am totally against outsourcing work from America. Jobs need to stay here, so I decided to go down and join the protests." (The Guardian, October 27).

Other workers have set up an encampment outside the plant,  held protests, and tried to block vehicles shipping the plant parts to China. The result has been over 20 arrests, including the arrest of Jesse Jackson. The company, in turn, has threatened to close the plant even earlier than planned if the demonstrations continue. At least one worker, Joanne Penniston, 35, was unintimidated, noting that the plant is closing anyway. With a daughter to support, though, and her job ending December 16, Penniston is worried:

            "There are no jobs here in Freeport. It's like a ghost town. Probably I will have to move," she said. (The Guardian)

            That shouldn’t bother Mitt; it’s investor profit, after all. And maybe that’s his plan for America: create enough ghost towns, get enough workers unemployed, and moving, and desperate, and willing to work for Chinese wages, and then maybe his capitalist cronies will begin to find America a “profitable” place to invest in again. Maybe. Meantime, it appears that large numbers of Americans are believing his promises to create 12 million new jobs (I keep waiting for him to show his magic wand of job creation, but it appears that all a candidate has to do is say something like this often enough, and the rubes believe him!) to have upped his poll numbers to the point where some polls actually have him ahead of the President.

            Seriously. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Lawrence DiStasi

Governor Etch-a-Sketch

The guy is truly shameless. I’m talking about Mitt Romney and his willingness to use any ploy, tell any lie, exploit any person, event, situation to pander to whatever the reigning opinion seems to be. When he was trying to court the Tea Party dopes now hyping the Republican right, he vowed that he was a conservative, always had been, and would cut taxes, end abortions, and pay no attention to 47% of the voters who were freeloaders anyway. Now, though, that he’s in the general election and trying desperately to curry the favor of the “undecided” middlers (how anyone could still be undecided about this race is beyond me), he’s saying he never intended to cut taxes for the rich and won’t, how he loves all the poor—including that 47%--and that limiting abortion “would not be part of his agenda.”

            You pandering, ass-licking creep!

            This latest flip-flop came in an interview with the Des Moines Register that was just published hours ago. The article—“Did Mitt Romney flip his stance on abortion—Again?”—points out that Romney actually started out as a pro-abortion-rights Republican (you can hear him saying this in a Buzzflash video), and then switched to “a firmly anti-abortion position shortly before his first presidential run in 2008.” He has referred to this as his “evolution” on abortion. As recently as September, he promised to de-fund Planned Parenthood—that bastion, in Republican eyes, of dastardly baby killers. But now, in the Register interview, he says “there’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.” Another etch-a-sketch moment. And then, just as quickly, his campaign “clarified” this by asserting that Romney “would of course support legislation aimed at providing greater protections for life.”

            Fortunately, he’s not getting away with all of it. Some Americans are actually paying attention to the etch before the current sketch. Like the mother of the Navy Seal Romney invoked in a recent speech. He had met this brave Seal, Romney recalled almost tearfully, and because he sort of knew him, he was doubly troubled by his death in the attack on the American Embassy in Libya recently. And he implied that were he the President, he, Romney, would have made sure no American would be killed in that type of ‘preventable’ attack—suggesting, with little subtlety, that the whole thing was Obama’s fault for not beefing up the protection for those poor heroes. What a craven asshole. Which is what Barbara Doherty, the mother of the slain Glenn Doherty said: that Mitt the Twit shouldn’t be using her son’s death to advance his own political campaign. 

“I don't trust Romney,” she said. “He shouldn't make my son's death part of his political agenda. It's wrong to use these brave young men, who wanted freedom for all, to degrade Obama.” 

Amen. But Mitt has a tin ear when it comes to this stuff. Hell, he seems to think, why shouldn’t I use a hero’s death to advance my political career? Why not use abortion? Why not use everything available, including the suffering of half the people in the United States, if it will get me into the White House?

            What can one say to such a plastic man? In an age when it seemed impossible for any politician to lower the standing of the 'smiling, damned villains' supposedly representing us, Governor Etch-a-Sketch is actually succeeding in sinking to new lows every time he opens his dreck-filled mouth. What I can’t understand is how anyone could be taken in by Governor Etch-a-Sketch. Or which one they can be taken in by.  

Lawrence DiStasi

How Do We Stand It?

I have been mulling over this question for the last few days, especially in light of the recent presidential debate wherein Mitt the Twit lied for 90 minutes straight without breaking his phony smile.  How do we stand it? especially when pundits laud his winning attitude—which is to say, his ability to lie and convey his pretend concern for the poor, and make it sound sincere?

            The question comes up all the time, in every forum imaginable. How do African Americans stand it when they contemplate the history of their enslavement, their continuous disenfranchisement even up to and including today’s so-called Voter ID Laws? How do they keep from murdering the white power structure responsible for all this, a structure which is still, in huge swaths of this country, the dominant power? How do Native Americans stand it; how keep from murdering the heirs of those who stole their whole continent, slaughtered them like dogs especially when they fought back, and then put the remnants on so-called reservations deprived of language and culture to the extent that their only recourse is to drown in alcohol and despair?

            Closer to average white experience, how do abused children stand it when their innocence is ripped from them—by fathers or grandfathers or stepfathers or boyfriends or, increasingly, by Catholic priests? How do such children keep from murdering their abusers? And if we, personally, haven’t been physically abused, how do the rest of us keep from cutting the throats of those who are abusing our democracy (actually, we’ve never had a real democracy much less a direct one; we’ve got a representative republic, with the direct vote filtered by such institutions as the electoral college, and the power of the senate which ensures that a few yahoos from under-populated states can block any legislation that might give the masses a real voice in governance)? I’m referring to what has become plain for all to see in recent years—the now overwhelming power of the corporate rich to exploit the common heritage, expropriate and destroy the natural environment (blow off the top of a mountain to get at the coal no longer accessible to conventional mines?), and then with the obscene wealth derived from such depredations, determine what laws are written by bought-off legislators. How do we stand it? How do we accommodate ourselves to the gutting of laws meant to protect us, to the rewriting of tax laws and health laws and environmental laws and financial-control laws and labor laws in such obvious ways as to have, in the past 40 years alone, diverted more wealth to the top 0.1% than in all the years of this republic up to then? How do we stand it? even when we learn about how it has been done (see “The Measure of a Nation Challenges Illusions of American Superiority,” truthout.org, 7 October) even when we see that we’re being screwed left and right and center? How is it that most of us simply shrug and conclude that there’s nothing to be done—it’s simply the way of the world; or, perhaps, tell ourselves that correcting it all would be too hard and might put the same or similar scoundrels in place anyway, so why struggle? The comfort we know, even as it’s steadily reduced, is better than the revolution we don’t know.

            Most of us prefer to play it safe, in other words. It’s what the thugs at the top always count on. Most people simply want to stay alive and reasonably healthy for as long as possible. Raise the kids and watch the tube. Have a few drinks and laugh and enjoy whatever is left of a reasonable life. Scream at the televised bullshit coming at us 24-7, or at a surrogate punching bag like a compliant spouse or small kids or a timorous dog, and muddle on. And rationalize that though we don’t have it quite as good as we once did, we’re still, in the USA, better off than three-quarters of the rest of the poor bastards on the planet, and so able to bear a bit more of the humiliation each day, a bit more of the invasion of our bodies and our minds by poisons geared to make billions for the lords at the top, a bit more of the waning of any hope for a truly satisfying solution to the problems of existence.

            And one more thing. Maybe, just maybe, there really is some inner sense on the part of at least some of us, that the world goes up and the world goes down no matter what little games our alleged “leaders” play. That there is a balance to things and that we in the United States, having been “blessed” with that enormous expanse of rich land our forebears stole outright, actually do have a debt to pay, and that kind of debt does not ever go away. Empires rise. Empires fall. Sooner or later, as Joseph Tainter points out in his Collapse of Complex Societies, the marginal returns on investments in farming, in technology, in education, in health care, in infrastructure become too little to justify the maintenance of such complexity. Too many bureaucrats are required, too many administrators are needed, and once the low-hanging fruit has been picked (as with drilling for oil or mining for coal or solving the problem of illness—the investment to find penicillin was about $20,000! Compare that to what it cost to even begin to control AIDS), the costs to produce or control or solve everything else rises so exponentially that at some point, abandoning complexity becomes a rational, even economic decision.

            And even beyond that, whether Obama gets elected and continues to peck away at a watered-down solution here and there, or whether Romney steals the whole thing and we are openly subjected once more to the government-destroying mandarins intent on enslaving the masses to increase their profits and keep themselves in multiple homes behind their platinum gates of hell—it really doesn’t matter. Because whether we thrive or whether we sink, in the end we are all saved no matter what, all equal no matter what, all equally fucked no matter what. We live and we die. And there’s no solution to that except to exult in the wonder that the sun, 93,000,000 miles away, somehow is placed at exactly the right distance for its thermonuclear furnace to warm our faces during the day, and relieve us with revivifying darkness at night. And that somehow, miraculously, we are in communion with that, and much more than that living and dead, no matter how many tax shelters assholes like Romney can hide their gold in, or how many lies they can put over on our gullible nation.

            Maybe that’s how we stand it.

Lawrence DiStasi

Israel's Election Blackmail

So now we get the news that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has publicly criticized the Obama Administration, and England’s David Cameron, for not giving an ultimatum—drawing a “red line” in the sand—to Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons’ program. The man known as “Bibi” said yesterday that no one had a “moral right” to prevent Israel from acting against what he alleges is a “mortal threat” from Iran.

            In an election year, these are fighting words. They are more than that: they are blackmail—because Netanyahu knows full well that his “good friend” Mitt Romney has already tried to score political points against an Obama administration that he charges is too weak on the Middle East, and too faint in its support of Israel. This is not because Americans in general want Obama to draw “red lines” in a Middle East that is already convulsed with wars and rebellions and still reeling from America’s unprovoked war on Iraq and its endless war in Afghanistan. No, this is about Florida. Because Mitt Romney absolutely must win Florida to have any chance to win the election, and if Florida’s retired Jewish population can be convinced that Obama is “weak” on Israel, it could be decisive. Netanyahu knows all this, of course, and so he is quite willing to incite a bidding war between Obama and Romney over who is most eager to “defend” Israel from those terrible Iranians or Arabs or Muslims or whatever they are.

            So the Bibi, without a shred of embarrassment or shame, talks about his “moral right” to respond to what he calls “mortal threats” from a country that has no nuclear capability whatsoever—whereas Bibi’s country, Israel, is known to have well over 200 and perhaps as many as 300 of the latest nuclear weapons, plus rocket delivery systems, and even nuclear submarines from which to launch them. All this in an Israel, alone among nations with such weapons, refusing to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—which it accuses Iran of violating. The hypocrisy is massive, it is sickening, it is an outrage.

            Nor is it just the hypocrisy. It’s the sheer chutzpah—that’s “gall” or “effrontery” in Yiddish—of a nation as small as Israel, with a mere 5 million people, publicly blackmailing the United States with a population of 300 million and a military larger than most of the rest of the world's combined. Where does this pipsqueak of a country come off ordering the U.S. to do anything?

            It all comes down, as every half-alive observer has noted endlessly, to the power of the Jewish lobby in the United States. Not just U.S. presidents, but the entire U.S. Congress quakes with fear when the Israeli lobby known as AIPAC questions the commitment of any office holder to towing the Israeli line. They quake when wealthy Jewish donors take the same questioning stance. And mostly, like Obama, they prostrate themselves, humiliate themselves with expressions of fealty to protecting poor little Israel from those big bad Arabs. This is what Israel—and its Jewish (and fundamentalist Christian) supporters in America—have come to expect. So when Hillary Clinton refused on Monday to set a red line, saying that America was “not setting deadlines for Iran,” and earlier last month when a British official secretly visited Israel to deliver a warning to Israel not to attack Iran, Bibi got the message. The two most critical nations he needs to back him if he does try, or threaten to try an attack against Iran, were essentially telling him to back off. Whence his angry statements about Israel’s “moral rights”—i.e. to obliterate anyone it chooses. That is the moral right Israel claims. And it has acted on those “moral” rights more than any other nation on earth. It has slaughtered and ethnically cleansed Palestinians with regularity, always claiming its moral right to self defense. And now, now that its two biggest backers tell it to wait for sanctions—the worst sanctions ever enacted against Iran, sanctions which cripple its people—to do their work, Netanyahu responds: “And I ask: wait for what? Until when? Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

            Israel, that is, the mad dog of the Middle East, armed to the teeth with nuclear as well as conventional weapons, claims the “moral right” to attack any time it perceives another nation as even approaching the possibility of being able to stand up to its bullying. That is the real issue. Iran’s nuclear program—which it has always claimed is for peaceful purposes—might allow it to build a weapon or two; and that might allow it to neutralize the threat of Israel’s being able to utterly destroy it with a nuclear strike; and that is a mortal threat in Israel’s terms. As is the position of the United States and England in refusing to back Israel’s threat to strike, or, more important, the refusal of the United States to attack Iran itself. That’s what the “red line” really signifies: if Iran crosses a U.S.-imposed red line, the U.S. military, with its capability to penetrate the deep sites where Iran’s nuclear program is hidden, will attack; and short of that, will provide backup for Israel if it attacks.

            So the situation is now this. Israel is publicly trying to blackmail the United States (and England) into war. Israel is trying to use the presidential election to force the President of the United States to threaten another country, a country which has attacked no one, with annihilation. Israel would have the United States commit itself, its American sons and daughters, and the entire world, to yet another conflagration in the Middle East.

            I don’t know about you, but this turns me, as it is apparently turning even Netanyahu’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, against him. It turns me against this situation—of a nation which the U.S. has supported and defended and built up with arms and aid for 60 years now—turning on its benefactor and trying to influence its domestic politics in the most blatant way imaginable. And to me, anyone in this country, any U.S. citizen who supports this kind of blackmail by a foreign country, is virtually engaging in treason. If America does not come first for Americans, if the safety and security of the United States is not the primary concern of its leaders and representatives, then they, too, are guilty of treason.

            Bibi Netanyahu must be told in no uncertain terms that he has gone too far. He must be told to butt out of American politics, and American elections. He must be told that American support is not automatic, nor is it endless; but rather that, especially with what is being called its deficit crisis, America’s aid to Israel can come, and will come to a certain and definitive halt. According to Reuters, Israeli leaders less rabid than Netanyahu have already been making this point. If he has any backbone at all, Obama should make it even more forcefully. Blackmail by an ally—and it is notable that Israel has refused to enter into a formal alliance with the United States, mainly because that would mean it would have to set firm borders to its nation, which, as an avidly expansionist power, it has always refused to do—simply cannot, must not, and will not be tolerated.

Lawrence DiStasi

Puking over Republicans

I’m noticing one overriding fact in writing about Republicans as they leer towards the end of their convention. I feel more and more nauseated by having to watch them, listen to them, sniff their pasty souls and outrageous deceptions. As one vivid example, Republicans have spent the last year and more raising alarms about the chief problem facing our country: the deficit. We owe trillions of dollars, is their mantra, and Obama has been the most irresponsible president in history in running up that debt. But as Matt Taibbi pointed out in a hard-hitting article in Rolling Stone yesterday (Aug. 29), it is actually Republicans, and Mitt Romney in particular, who are the debt mongers. Here is what he says:

Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

What Taibbi is referring to, of course, is Romney’s reign at Bain Capital, the “private equity” company he headed for years, and through which he made his big money. That’s because the way “leveraged buyouts” (LBOs) work is by the gathering of a small amount of capital (by companies like Bain) with which to borrow huge amounts of money (borrowing a lot with only a little is called “leverage”) from the likes of Goldman Sachs, so they can take over a given company. One example Taibbi uses is the buyout of KB Toys. In that case, Bain put up $18 million of its own, and then borrowed no less than $302 million from investment banks to complete the deal. Then Bain induced KB Toys to “redeem $121 million in stock and take out more than $66 million in bank loans - $83 million of which went directly into the pockets of Bain's owners and investors, including Romney.” Long story short, KB Toys went into bankruptcy (because, you see, the company is saddled with the huge debt Bain borrowed to buy it, and has to pay it off, often an impossibility, even after laying off half its workers), while Bain earned a return of “at least 370% on the deal” or up to 900% if the assertion of Big Lots, LB Toys’ former parent company, is correct. In dollar terms, that is, Bain added more than $300 million in debt to KB Toys, and took out more than $120 million in cash via fees and other perks. As usual, they managed to do this by giving big bonuses to the company’s top managers: “CEO Michael Glazer got an incredible $18.4 million, while CFO Robert Feldman received $4.8 million and senior VP Thomas Alfonsi took home $3.3 million.” Of course, mere workers were left with no jobs and no money at all when the company, formerly a successful maker of things, went belly up.

            Now we have Mitt Romney, and his current attack dog, Paul Ryan (but really, doesn’t Ryan look like some bug-eyed Disney cartoon?) excoriating President Obama for piling up $5 trillion in debt. This is the Republican mantra. Debt will bring down our country. Debt is the cancer eating away at the American dream. Government simply can’t afford to spend any money on frills—by which they mean, of course, social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, or any kind of welfare programs whatever (other than corporate welfare, of course). Austerity, that’s the only way to get out of our debt crisis. And the fact that Mitt is the great debt creator himself, or that economic history has proven that austerity fails to solve depressions, and in fact makes them worse—because the problem, as Paul Krugman has pointed out endlessly, is that austerity reduces employment, and people without jobs can’t afford to spend money, so businesses don’t invest, having no one to sell to, hence the depression—matters not a jot. Romney and most Republican movers and shakers, that is, are investors. And investors make their money by being paid back in currency that is more, not less valuable. If money that debtors pay back is less valuable, then investors lose. This is the whole story in a nutshell. The deficit becomes the prime concern of the investor class because they fear that inflation rises from it; and inflation, whether it be rising prices, or an increase in the money supply (which is what finances stimulus programs to put people back to work), cheapens the value of the dollars they have invested. Being paid back in cheaper dollars is a loss to them. What they really want is to be paid back in more valuable dollars—the result of deflation. They can’t opt for too much deflation, of course, because that would bring down the whole system. But enough deflation to bring sufficient pain to the poor bastards who have borrowed from them, and a somewhat greater return on their investments, is just right. This is the core of the “hard, courageous” choices they pretend to make as leaders: pain and deprivation for the working stiffs, the ones who borrow, so the investor class and financiers can have ever bigger cars and houses and yachts and private schools for their precious offspring.

            This makes the upcoming election starker than any in recent memory. If the Republicans manage to convince the benighted American public of the rightness of their deficit analysis, and win this election to put Romney in the driver’s seat, with a Republican congress to allow him to implement his austerity program (austerity for you and me, that is, not for the investor class who can count on lower tax rates and bigger loopholes in which to hide their money), watch out. The nation will be even more the plaything of the moneyed class, while the so-called “entitlement” programs that keep the unemployed from falling off the edge entirely, will be decimated. We simply can’t afford them, will be the Republican rationale. Which is to say, we simply can’t afford the poor.

            What we will be able to afford are even more and bigger mansions for the likes of corporate raiders like Romney, and even better financial deals for his backers—the Goldman Sachses, the Morgan Stanleys, the Citigroups, and dear old Sheldon Adelson. I may need a whole blog to cover the latter—the most foul, scabrous creature that has appeared on a national scene since Charles Dickens was portraying them in his novels—but here, suffice it to say, this is the guy who earns his money running a gambling empire, the Sands Corporation, that is even now under investigation by the Justice Department for allegations of bribery (in China) and money laundering (everywhere). Nice fellow. And Adelson has said in no uncertain terms, that he will personally spend at least $100 million to get Republicans elected not just to the presidency, but to Congress as well. If he succeeds, of course, there will be a new Attorney General, and (he no doubt hopes and intends) his legal problems will go away. There will also be a more generous and cooperative (read ‘obsequious’) policy towards Israel’s Likudniks, as well as a more aggressive policy towards Iran and other Israeli “enemies” like Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinians, and just about the whole middle east.

            In short, a disaster. So while earlier I had suggested that it might be time for progressives to start thinking in terms of third-party candidates, the situation has become too dire for that. Obama must win a second term. Otherwise, we will be buried beneath a deluge of corporate money and power the likes of which we haven’t seen since Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan and their fellow robber barons ran the government as their own private fiefdom—though not even then would they have dared put one of their own, nakedly proclaiming his greed, in the White House.

Lawrence DiStasi

           

           

            

The Individualism Delusion

All the demagoguery of the presidential election season coming at us 24-7, plus the recent hoopla over Olympic athletes and their “reaching of goals,” has set me thinking about the rampant individualism that rules, or purports to rule, our world. Pols like Romney and his new running mate, Paul Ryan, are desperate to demonstrate a) their record of success either in business or politics or both, and b) their possession of “plans” to solve the crises du jour instantly, and for the foreseeable future. In a similar way, the gold medalists, prompted by fawning interviewers, love to point out how they’ve been planning and willing and training for their moment of triumph for years, and thus fully deserve to luxuriate in their success. The background for all this, for all the shouting of USA! USA! at the Olympics, is the confirmation of our most cherished idea: that determined individuals are the engines of success, and that all any person needs is drive and will and a refusal to bow to any handicaps or obstacles to reach the summit of human or national achievement. I did it, I made it, I alone am the author and agent of my own glory (sometimes with a sign of the cross or a pointing to the sky to acknowledge that my personal god has, of course, helped me because he is the most powerful of all gods, and hence, though busy, able to specifically concern himself with my welfare as an individual.)

            Included in all this is an implied dismissal of the part played by any other factor, be it luck, or the bounty of nature, or my genetic or financial or social inheritance, or any outside contribution whatever. The idea is that we in the modern world succeed on our own. We succeed as individuals by being individualists, even up to and including being consciously selfish and competitive where other individuals, species, or nations are concerned. We get to be number one by not being squeamish about fighting for our place at the head of the line, at the top of the heap, by standing up for ourselves and making clear that we will crush all competition if that is what it takes to be number one--indeed, that we enjoy the competition, that we shine brightest when the prize is on the line, when victory can be seized by a sheer effort of will that pushes us to beat the hell out of whoever is behind us or beside us or outside us. Life is a brutal competition after all, and not for the faint of heart.

            This, of course, is at the heart of the battle between Republicans and Democrats in the current election; with Romney and Ryan as the prime exhibits in this paean to individualism. Romney touts himself as the “self-made” billionaire, the clear-eyed wizard of finance who made billions by buying up faltering companies and “turning them around” to be sold at a nice, fat profit. To do this, he had to be quick, and ruthlessly efficient at not wasting time or mental energy worrying about silly things like unions or people getting fired  or communities getting devastated, or any of the other soft-headed concerns so dear to liberals. Efficiency and profit had to be all; followed, when the money poured in, with more cleverly efficient ways to avoid taxes and hide his gains in offshore Swiss or Cayman Island accounts. All of which was perfectly “legal” and perfectly understandable to most Americans. He did it alone, he did it his way, and he has, so the song goes, the perfect right to keep his hard-won earnings. All of it. Paul Ryan sings a similar song. His grandfather (comparable to Romney’s father, who made his fortune in automobiles) earned millions building roads paid for by the government, and so left for little Paulie the right and leisure to go to Washington and become, all on his own, the courageous spear-carrier for the Republican right, unafraid to make “hard choices.” (Ryan’s wife Janna, from a similarly prominent Oklahoma farm/political family, spent a decade in Washington herself, first as a congressional aide and then as a corporate lobbyist for such business stalwarts as cigar makers, logging giants, pharmaceutical bandits, health maintenance organizations and nuclear power plants.) And so we get Paulie’s mantra: freedom comes from god (and/or wealthy families), not from government. With that freedom, we individuals should be able to do what we want with our money (primarily keep it), send our kids to whatever private or charter schools we choose—using government vouchers to pay for them—and even turn health care into a voucher system so we, as individuals, can get whatever health coverage we can afford without having to come in contact with all those unsavory types who can’t pay to cover themselves and thus want ever more of our taxes to pay for them. Because it’s our money, earned (or inherited or stolen) by our individual effort fair and square; so we shouldn’t have to give it to a wasteful, money-hungry government determined to share it with lazy losers and odorous freeloaders.

            We all recognize and respond to this, of course, because we’re all subject to the same selfish, self-aggrandizing impulse. When we succeed at something, we want to take full credit for it. It was due to our hard work, our intelligence, our persistence, our rare insight or foresight. When things go wrong, on the other hand, we tend to attribute the failure to others, or bad luck, or our parents’ incapacity, or the animosity or perversity of the outside world. More specifically, we tend to view ourselves, our conscious selves located somewhere in our heads, as generally in control, as the decision makers, the agents of our perception and action who size up a situation and then make a rational, informed decision about what or who or how to choose. We comparison shop for a car or a house, we consult the experts and our friends, we calculate our budget, and we make the right decision. When deciding about a new friend or a new job, we imagine ourselves taking everything into account, mulling over our options, and deciding based on our best reasoned judgment (being careful to choose friends who will ratify our judgment).

            The truth, though, is that our decision-making process is far less rational and considered than we think. Danel Kahneman has written a whole book—Thinking Fast and Slow—about this, and it is sobering indeed. The basic idea is that our thinking and decision-making process depends on two systems which Kahneman calls System 1 (our intuitive process that operates very rapidly, and below the level of consciousness) and System 2 (the slower, conscious, logical system with which we identify.) What Kahneman shows us, with countless examples and variations, is the extent to which an alarmingly high percentage of our decisions are in fact made by System 1—that is, quickly, based on rapid impressions and ancient responses that take place below our level of consciousness. As Kahneman notes, “cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.” This means that thinking in this way is subject to visceral responses (one experiment showed how people presented with odd pairings of words like bananas and vomit tend to immediately associate a tasty fruit with nausea, and hence display a rapid tensing and avoidance tendency to bananas) that happen below the level of awareness. What is happening is that “System 1 makes as much sense as possible of the..oddly juxtaposed words…by linking the words in a causal story” so as to prepare for a possible threat. That is what System 1 is needed for, designed for: real world threats that often do not afford an organism the luxury of time and slow, rational consideration of all the evidence. When an instant response—to loud sound, or an unknown shape or smell—can be the difference between life and death, it is far better to be quick, and safe, than sorry. Hence our System 1 responds rapidly, even when the “threat” is a silly juxtaposition of words like “banana” and “vomit.” The well-known response of “priming” works via this same system: in an experiment at NYU, students were asked to assemble four-word sentences from a group of five words. One group had neutral words, while another had these: Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. The students thought this was a test of verbal skill, but it was not, for when finished, participants were asked to walk down the hall to another experiment. The walk was the real subject of the experiment, for it was timed. And the experimenters found that those students who had made sentences from the words suggesting “old age” actually walked down this hallway far more slowly than the others! Mere words and associations of those words primed a physical behavior, walking; thinking of old age made people walk older. Of course, many people who take part in, or hear of priming can’t believe that they could be so affected. That is because their System 2—the rational, conscious part that they consider to be themselves—believes that it is in charge. When confronted with evidence that it is not, people bridle with disbelief.

            More important, when System 1 jumps to unwarranted conclusions, based on its rapid response to limited information, System 2, always seeking coherence, will often endorse those intuitive responses, in order to have the world make sense (“we are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world,” notes Kahneman). Such an endorsement of intuitive beliefs can operate in a political system too, as when people allow their likes and dislikes (immediate impressions based in System 1) to determine their beliefs about the world. If a person likes the Affordable Care Act, for example, he would tend to believe in its great health benefits and the reasonableness of the costs. If a person dislikes Obamacare, however, then the benefits seem negative and the costs outrageous and Obama a damned socialist.  

            More than that, people tend to be overly confident in their beliefs, including the belief that those beliefs are the product of rational thought (System 2) rather than rapid impressions (System 1). What this means is that, despite the evidence, people who have had their beliefs confirmed—as for instance, those, like CEOs, who have been successful in business, or the stock market—tend to be overly-optimistic. Like political and military leaders, they feel both smart and lucky and therefore try to convince others to follow them. As Kahneman puts it:

            Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.

Anyone who has looked at the world carefully, of course, knows that luck does not last, that what goes up must come down, and that the complexity of any life situation can rarely be reduced to the rapid intuitions of System 1 that are often responsible for  decisions (think only of George W. Bush and his great faith in his “gut feelings” when he took the entire nation and half the world into the disaster that was, and still is, Iraq.)

            But the inadequacy of individualism only begins with personal psychology. The more we learn from science and life itself, the more we realize that only a fool could imagine that he or she is in full control of life events, or responsible for their successful outcome. Each of us is a mere speck in the vast panoply of a universe that seems to have no end. Billions of years of evolution have made each of us improbable and improbably-complex beings possible. The very elements like carbon and iron of which we are made required the massive heat of the interior of stars to forge their structure, and further billions of years—once life, another massive improbability, had somehow emerged—to perfect the intricate structures of cells, and then organs, and then sophisticated neural systems and finally consciousness itself. How much did any single, proud “individualist” have to do with that? How much do any of us have to do with the maintenance of the ideal conditions on this planet—another massive improbability—that keeps oxygen at levels sufficient for us to even breathe? How much do individuals have to do with their own breathing, with the pumping of blood through their organs and arteries and veins? How much control do they have over their cellular machinery and its myriad changes and creations of enzymes and depletion of wastes? The mystery of all this, plus the chance encounters that often determine the courses of our lives—the meeting with someone with whom we find a common objective in life, a compatible heartbeat in love—and the very fact that we take the right turn on a highway to avoid a collision or the right airplane to avoid a crash or have had the good fortune to be born in a country that has never been invaded or at a time or a place with parents that foster our survival, is enough to humble even the proudest among us. Or should. And isn’t it this that is the basis of the most wise of religions, of the most sophisticated of wisdom traditions? Is it not this that is the basis of the gratitude and the sacrifice that is traditionally offered to those deities who are seen to be in charge of this unimaginably complex and favorable (to us) system of life?

            Sadly, our hyper-individualists seem to think that recognizing this, recognizing our truly deep dependency on and identity with all else in the universe, on all others on this planet, on every tiny mite and spider and amoeba and the bacteria in our guts and in our very mouths that make our digestion possible; and the processes of mineral uptake in plants and their ability to synthesize from the very air, from sunlight, the nutrients upon which we as mammals depend for our very existence—this dependence on all else (including the roads and bridges and schools and fire departments all built and managed and maintained by those governments they love to excoriate) somehow diminishes them. Diminishes their glory. Diminishes their sense of self-sufficiency. But that self-sufficiency is an illusion. A most pernicious illusion in fact. For it allows them to exult in their pride—the deadliest of sins—and delude themselves into thinking that they can ‘make it on their own.’ True wisdom has always known that this was wrong. Wrong headed. Wrong minded. The source of the deepest ignorance. And yet, our entire nation is built on this ignorance. We alone discovered the New World, the New Man. We alone conquered an entire continent. We alone, the special nation, subsequently conquered the world. We the unique nation, the nation blessed uniquely by a unique god, are the nation destined by god to be a model for all nations. The model itself based on the uniqueness of the individual, self-sufficient, making it on his own. With the contrary notion—that of dependency, that we are all, all humans, all creatures, all beings in this together—taking the form of anathema. Paganism and devil worship. The corruption of slave nations, the antithesis of freedom.

            In fact, that dependency, that togetherness and its nobility is just the opposite, the real way to true freedom, true worth, true uniqueness. I have always liked the take of the Hwa Yen Buddhists in imaging this, this reverence for all life, for all being, this knowing that all, no matter how humble or apparently useless or failed, have equal worth. The world, said the Hwa Yen Buddhists, is like a huge structure, a house. And each of us, each allegedly separate being, is like one of the rafters of that house. Or one of the nails or one of the roofing boards or windows or pieces of concrete holding it up. Both unique, and integral to the whole. For without each rafter, each nail, each bit of wood or steel or concrete that goes into making it up, without each element in place, there is no house at all. A house without one of its rafters is not actually a house, said the Hwa Yen Buddhists. A house, to be a house, must be a complete house. And that is what life is like. That is what being is like. A whole. Each element, each component, each being, each organ, each cell is necessary and integral to the whole. And so deserves the utmost respect. Deserves the acknowledgment that it depends, intimately and mutually and utterly, on all the others. None of us can thrive, none of us can survive, none of us can even pretend to be on our own. None. Not Mitt Romney, not Paul Ryan, not the homeless guy stretched out on the sidewalk, not the Olympian who wins gold, not the most despised of creatures in a sewer or the most venerated bishop of Rome or president of a republic—none can survive on his own or her own. To pretend that one can, to pretend that one is a self-sufficient individual with no need or concern for others, or for government, or for regulations, or for public schools or a decent system of care for the aged or the halt or the lame, is simply ignorant. Ignorant of the most fundamental laws of life. And to put faith in such ignorance would be ignorance itself.

            Which is not to say that millions of people won’t do so. Which is not to say that millions don’t already pervert the teachings of the very god they claim as their own, the god who said “whatever you do unto the least of these, you do for me.” No, they will pervert it and distort it and deceive themselves into the idea that their only connection to the “least of these” is to horde enough wealth to be able to trickle some charity upon them. A penny from the heaven they imagine themselves inhabiting. But this is ignorance, pure and simple, and will, sooner or later, be seen through. And all the alleged wizards seen as the pathetic, frightened faux-individuals that they are.  

Lawrence DiStasi

No Shortage of Weenies

So the Mitt (or is it the Mutt?) has finally chosen his VP—Paul Ryan.

            The first question that popped into my head was: Dear God, where do the Republicans get all these dweebs? And then it occurred to me: the Grand Old Party just never runs out of Weenies to put on the national stage. I mean look at the lineup they had vying for the Presidential nomination before Mitt outspent them all, led by that queen of shrill vapidity, Michelle Bachman. Has anyone ever seen her like? And then there was the Newt, like some thatch-headed extra for a revolutionary war film who forgot his uniform. Followed by that refugee from a minstrel show, Herman Cain; with Texas’s Rick Perry looking as if he’s forgotten his blunderbuss but remains eager to shoot someone, anyone; and Ron Santorum blathering as if he’s forgotten his Bible while trying to figure out whether Roman Catholics are supposed to read the Bible in the first place. Blunderers all; thundering idiots you would not ever want to be caught cornered at a party with. I met an aspirant to some minor office at a party in New Jersey once when I was just out of college. What a tool. He was the type of guy you knew from school or work who everyone was always trying to slip away from. The phrase an editor colleague of mine once used to describe another colleague is perfect here: “He has halitosis of the soul.” It’s a condition the Republican party has made its own.

            Hence the current VP nominee, Paul Ryan. Does he not look like his mother forgot to tell him how to tuck his shirt in or comb his hair? Earnest, self-righteous, and dorky in the extreme. Eagerly proclaiming his intention to save the republic from the flaming socialist-commie-teacher-darkie government revenooers he sees everywhere trying to spend us into oblivion. Save the nation: cut the fat out of the budget: which is to say, get all the freeloaders—the poor, the aged, the minorities, the halt and the lame—off the backs of the good Americans (like the Koch Brothers, his big backers) who work for a living! No free lunch! We need to take the hard steps to get our house in order (except for the military of course; Ryan, an avid hunter, loves the gun-toters; and also excepting the platinum health care reserved for himself and other Congressionals). And it occurs to me: what has happened to the Irish in the state of Wisconsin? I mean, the real Irish of old in cities like New York and Boston who were pols of the old school, ready to breathe fire to implement social justice. Folks like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Mary “Mother” Jones of the Wobblies, Honey Fitz in Boston and the Boston Kennedys and the Walkers and the Daleys who, though they were operators, at least operated a good part of the time on behalf of working people and the underdog. But Wisconsin! First they give us Joe McCarthy, that demagogue of a witch hunter who saw commies in every closet. Then they give us Scott Walker, the current governor and model dweeb, another lap dog of the Koch brothers ridding the public payroll of all those unionists and government pensioners. And now Paul Ryan, with his budget fix that will enrich the rich and disembowel the poor, with his recent quote: “American rights come from God, not government.” Oh really? Weren’t there some government guys who fought and died for those rights? Weren’t there some Jeffersons and Franklins in Philadelphia who secured those rights in a government document?

            In a way, though, Ryan is the perfect fit for that original dweeb, the Mitt. If ever two pols were a match in their awkwardness, in their disregard for common people, in their rigidity of hair and thought and white paranoia, it’s these two. Who could ever imagine either one of them with an emotion? with a human response to suffering? with a genuine response to a song—other than a pre-planned hand-on-breast-for-the-cameras pose for the national anthem? Though they try to feign it, of course, and play down the harshness of their plans, and pretend to be all for the people. Yeah, but which people? The ones who love vouchers, is who they mean; the ones who want to shed tears over the unborn, but who are perfectly happy to condemn living breathing human beings of the “wrong sort” to perpetual servitude.

            And all we can hope is that a majority of American voters will feel that heartlessness, will feel that void where humanity normally lives, even if they can’t quite figure out intellectually that a vote for these guys is a vote for the return of the white-bread ideologues who nearly brought the house down in the first place, and fully intend to do it again if given the chance.

Lawrence DiStasi

Election (Hold-your-nose) Time

I have to tell you I’m not looking forward to the upcoming presidential election. Even though he has the advantage of incumbency, President Obama appears to be faltering already, with a recent poll giving Mitt Romney a 46% to 43% lead over the President. This is an ominous sign—a sign of an electorate fed up with incumbents and too susceptible to propaganda to be able to figure out the Republican strategy of crippling government at all levels to get gullible voters to conclude it’s really government that’s the problem. Not to mention the sheer racism that is a brisk wind at Republican backs. And the loony right that characterizes anyone left of Attila the Hun as a Socialist.

            Of course we know Obama is anything but. The man who seemed at least progressive has now revealed an inner core so concerned about making nice with power elites (due to his training at private schools and Harvard?) that he has compromised virtually everything he ever seemed to stand for. His health care bill is a joke, and probably about to be struck down. His response to the economic collapse is an even bigger joke. And he seems allergic to saying anything about the “poor” or “working classes,” both of whom have disappeared from his political lexicon. Two videos are key documents in this regard: both from Frontline, they are “The Warning,” and the more recent two-part series, “Money, Power & Wall Street.” Both show that Obama was totally mesmerized, if not poisoned, by the Clintons and their brand of democratic “pragmatism,” i.e. cozying up to money power. “The Warning” is perhaps the most infuriating, even though the action it depicts took place in the waning years of the Clinton presidency. It portrays the drama of Brooksley Born (brought into the government through her contact with Hillary, and named not the Attorney General [Bill found her cold and dull], but head of the sleepy Commodity Futures Trading Commission, charged with overseeing then-obscure over-the-counter derivatives trading). Born immediately saw big problems with this growing and totally unregulated market, and began to draft regulations to control it. The Clinton economic team—Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary, Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve chief and alleged economic magician, and Larry Summers as Rubin’s right-hand man and enforcer—went ballistic and tried every ploy to bulldoze her into silence. Greenspan early on took her into his office to convey his bizarre take on market fraud. As Born recounted it, “he explained there wasn’t a need for a law against fraud because if a floor broker was committing fraud, the customer would figure it out and stop doing business with him.” In short, the free market would take care of fraud, as it took care of everything else, no regulations needed.

            They were wrong, as the world found out in 2008, but as these economic geniuses found out even before then, in September 1998 when the huge hedge fund betting heavily on derivatives, Long Term Capital Management, nearly failed—for precisely the reasons Born had laid out. But did they change? Not on your life. Instead of now agreeing to regulations, the big three managed to coerce over a dozen banks to bolster LTCM with a huge infusion of cash, and “save” the system. They also saved their plan to get Congress to pass a moratorium on Born’s planned regulations. Notwithstanding Congressional hearings at which Born insisted that the LTCM collapse “should serve as a wake-up call about the unknown risks in the over-the-counter derivatives market,” the Rubin-Greenspan-Summers troika upped the pressure, and Congress passed the moratorium icing regulations. They got rid of Born in the bargain: Two months later, in April 1999, Brooksley Born announced she would leave the now-muzzled agency she headed.

            "Cassandra" (Born) finally did get her day of reckoning when she recently, and for the Nth time, warned about the danger of “Dark Markets,” still unregulated, whose size now exceeds $680 trillion dollars—more than 10 times the gross national product of all the nations of the world. And we were reminded of the hazards of these “dark markets” just this month when the nation’s largest bank, JP Morgan-Chase, reported that it had lost some $2 billion in a bad bet on derivatives, a loss that is now $5 billion and climbing.

            In light of all this, it’s worth remembering what Obama did when he entered office in 2008. He brought the unregenerate Larry Summers back to be his chief economic advisor; chose, instead of Paul Volcker, Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary; and thus cemented in place the noxious notions of Robert Rubin, by then back in business as CEO of Citibank, another failing behemoth on the dole (Rubin had earlier left his post as CEO of Goldman Sachs to become Clinton’s treasury secretary). With such people shaping his perceptions of what makes sense economically, there was no way Barack Obama could institute policies on behalf of ordinary people rather than the Bigs of Finance. And he did as he was told. Sadly, he has done this in virtually every area of government (including the most repressive areas: he has brought more cases against whistleblowers than even Bush did, and his drone warfare—simply killing suspects ala Israel, rather than trying to bring them to justice—has become a national scandal). It seems the president has serious trouble standing up to the established powers gathered around him, and that includes the Republican leadership with whom he continues, despite endless spittle in his face and stabs in his back, to try to compromise.

            Is there even a need to speak about the other guy, Willard (that’s his name) Romney? Bain Capital was his golden goose, being a takeover company that made billions in the go-go 80s and 90s by buying up overvalued companies, firing half their labor force to “make them profitable,” loading them with debt to finance their very takeover, and then selling them to gullible buyers or into bankruptcy. Such takeover artists are the creeps who helped eviscerate a once-productive economy. And yet, we find 46% of the American people aiming to put this raptor in charge of the entire government. Are there so many rabid idiots and racists willing to vote for anyone to get rid of the black man in the White House? So many who are willing to ignore the staggering hypocrisy of the man (a recent piece by Timothy Eagan about Romney points out that the candidate’s prating about his firm principle to marriage “as a relationship between one man and one woman” hardly squares with his illustrious Mormon forebears—a great grandfather, Miles P. Romney, who had 5 wives, and a great-great grandfather, Parley Pratt, who had an even dozen, yes, 12 wives!)? It seems there are.

            This leaves most of the electorate with the most odoriferous of choices. Either hold your nose and vote for the guy who betrayed almost every hope he engendered, with the promise of more to come; or vote for the latest oligarch tripping over himself to curry favor with the bat-shit crazies of the right.  

            Unless—one decides to vote Green. I have recently heard and read about Jill Stein, on the brink of getting the Green Party’s presidential nomination. I think she deserves everyone’s consideration. She’s an MD—a doctor who specializes in environmental health— and an advocate for everything we thought Obama might accomplish, or at least bring up: a New-Deal-type plan to create 25 million mostly Green jobs, at a price similar to what the bank bailout cost; a pledge to break up the big Wall Street banks, emphasizing smaller state development banks catering to local businesses and homeowners; and a vow to implement real single payer health care for all. In addition, she’s not afraid to call for some actual policy changes regarding the United States’ long-running support of Israel’s illegal occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. She’s smart, not afraid to say what she thinks, and attractive and articulate in laying out her views. I am seriously thinking that Green might be the way to go this year, especially in light of what appears to be yet another “hold your nose” election. Even though the last time progressives made such a choice and the vote for Ralph Nader helped to elect the Bushwah, it may be time to try again. After all, how long can these stomach-souring, least-evil choices be tolerated? Obama may get beaten anyway; in which case voting for him would feel bitter indeed. But if millions of people vote Green, perhaps, even without winning, the long-term stranglehold over the electoral process—a voting trap between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dumber—can begin to be broken. Perhaps the related stranglehold of money and finance in our politics, of business as usual, can also be loosened. (For myself, I would like to see elections in which air time on TV is given free to major candidates; that is the least the corporations who hold rights to the people’s airwaves should pay back; and it would, at a stroke, eliminate the necessity for expensive ads.) At the least, the allowable limits of what can and cannot be said by a major candidate would change radically. To get more details, go to http://www.jillstein.org/.

            One thing is certain. Something has to be done to change the way politics is played and won in this country. Voting Green might just be a good beginning.

Lawrence DiStasi