Making 'Merica Great "Again"

Aside from the Trumpetes’ foolish jabber about turning back the clock on technology, trade, energy and natural resources, employment and management skills, and reality, I think an examination of what it would take to return our economy from a deficit to a surplus system is an interesting idea. Of course, Republicans deserve massive credit for driving the economy deep into deficit spending: Reagan and Bush II were both huge deficit spending believers. In spite of their big talk about the terror of deficit spending, Republicans absolutely rebelled when Obama told them he expected future spending bills to be on a “pay as you go basis.” The Party of Stupid is also the party of “borrow and spend” and nothing is going to change that in any foreseeable future.

 

However, if we did suddenly become responsible and decide to put on our big boy pants and do the dirty work of turning around the economy, what would we do? This is my list, in order of importance:

1. Money and politics has to go. Not only does Citizens United need to be overturned, but we need a Constitutional Amendment banning private money (corporate and individual) from our political campaigns. That law needs teeth, as in “you get caught, you hang.” We won’t seriously look at any real solutions until our government is not bought and sold on a daily basis.
2. The tax system has to be fixed. We’ve been at “war” since 2003 and the only way to pay for wars is to progressively tax income until the war debt is gone. I can see how eliminating the corporate tax could be incentive for business in the US, but that has to be coupled with doubling-down on unearned income taxation, inheritance taxes, and upper-income tax rates. Continuing to encourage rock stars and athletes, banksters and money laundering, and Trump-like con artists with tax incentives to do unproductive money-shuffling has cost the country at least two generations of scientists, engineers, and people who could be doing actual work. Incentives are everything and our current tax system provides incentives for exactly the wrong things; including activities that endanger national security.
3. The world is on the metric system and the longer we put off moving to modern weights and measurements the less competitive American companies and workers become. Face it, nobody but us cares about the length of the King’s fuckin’ foot. If you think that is an exaggeration, the only non-metric countries in the world are: Burma, Liberia, and the USA. Talk about being late to the party! Thomas Jefferson was the first President to recommend the metric system and we still can’t figure it out. Not being comfortable with the world’s weights and measurements puts a serious crimp in the abilities of American workers, technicians, and engineers. It makes many of our manufactured products useless to the rest of the world. Constantly doing mental or paper/computer conversions slows us down, creates errors, and makes Americans look backward and foolish to the rest of the world.
4. The current slow death of religion has to speed up. Currently, about 18% of people 60 and younger attend church and fewer than 50% believe in God. That's an improvement over the past 50 years of superstition, but not enough and not nearly quick enough. Every thing from science, energy production, employability, democracy, to national security is being damaged by our national proclivity toward superstition and fantasy. To keep up, we’ll have to grow up.
5. The war machine and military-industrial complex have to go. Not only do we have to quit pretending we're the world's policeman, we have to admit we suck at the job. We can't tell national security from corporate interests and until we can we need to put our weapons back on the shelf. The US loves war, but we can't afford it. As a peace-keeper, we’re not that talented.
6. Our public education system needs to be overhauled. First, private education needs to die. When the wealthy can abandon public education and do everything in their power to contaminate the discussion about how to educate the whole country to benefit their class, the whole country gets screwed. Finland provides us with a terrific example and, since our own experiment has been a disaster, we need to look to someone who has built a wheel that actually turns and supports weight. As Jeff Beck said, “Amateurs borrow, professionals steal.” We need to rip the pages out of Finland’s education reform book and paste them into our own system.
7. We have to go back into space. The brief moment when 'Merica was great by almost everyone's standards was when we were in the Space Race and were focused on a big accomplishment. The scientific and industrial spin-offs from NASA were incredible. We owe much of what we know today about climate change to NASA's research. As crippled as our industrial and scientific power is today, without the space race we'd be 3rd world. This is a no-brainer.
8. Every “for profit” industry in the country needs to be re-evaluated to see if it is working better than when those activities were performed by non-profits and government. Personally, I think deregulation and privatization has been a disaster, but I have not made a scientific study of every area where it has been applied. I have been upfront and close to education, health care, energy, and infrastructure and I am unimpressed with the performance of the private sector.
9. Our legal system needs to get over its power tripping and empire building and develop a sense of proportion. Police need to go after big crime and quit screwing around with the easy and safe stuff. Victimless crimes do not belong at the top of the priority list. The War on Drugs was a fraud and it’s long past time to admit it. The big money and long-term damage to society is in white collar crime and that’s where the main enforcement and prosecution focus needs to be: cybercrime, financial fraud, corporate environmental and consumer abuse, and the government contracting corruption and bribery that risks national security. Our prison system needs to be refocused on rehabilitation rather than punishment and revenge. We can not be the country that leads in citizens incarcerated and hope to be anything resembling “great.” National, state, and local police departments are over-staffed with unskilled goons who are great at beating up protestors, jailing small-time criminals, and protecting corporate criminals, but they are helpless when it comes to tracking down the lowest-level hacker who has ripped off a few thousand retirees bank accounts. Our law enforcement system needs to be updated and technological to get the right job done. Use the Pareto principle to identify the most effective places to spend time and money and quit knee-jerk reacting to squeaky wheels.

That’s my list. What have you got?

#193 Fighting for "My Country"

There are things that we don't talk about in polite company. There are words we don't say out loud in public. There are ideas we don't ever mention when there is a chance that they might be brought up when we are running for office, applying for a job, or asking for a home loan. I'm not as old as McSame, but I'm old enough that I don't worry much about the damage my words will do to my political chances, career opportunities, or housing situation. As a refuge from the 1960's, I distrust the motivations of the people in power, almost always.

Patriotism is one of the least understood concepts in American life. What we often mistake for patriotism is usually nothing more sophisticated than nationalism. Webster's defines patriotism as "love for or devotion to one's country" and nationalism as "a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups." The second definition is pretty wordy, but informative.

"Love" is an emotion that requires sacrifice, understanding, commitment, perspective, and knowledge. You can't love your country, spouse, children, or friends if you don't exercise these capacities. You can be addicted to them, infatuated with them, or dependent on them without loving them. When patriotism is linked to the kind of service typically promoted by the military, the line between informed patriotism and ignorant nationalism is more than just blurred.

Since 1948, the overwhelming majority of American military actions have been inspired by reasons other than national security. The argument that we needed to fight and die in Vietnam, for example, because of some fear of the spread of communism was dishonest, wrong, and immoral. Nobody with a functioning brain believed that the Viet Cong were going to invade the United States. Once the Pentagon Papers made it clear that American forces were not attacked in the Tonkin Gulf and that the entire justification, as weak as it was, for the military build-up in 1964 was based on a deliberate lie, even the dumbest nationalist would have to admit that there were other reasons for committing American lives to that pointless Asian civil war.

Korea was the same as was the 1959-60 Caribbean War, the evacuation of US corporate employees in Lebanon in 1976, our involvement in El Salvador in the 1980s, the military maneuvers in and around Iran, Libya, Chad, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon (again) throughout the Reagan years, the invasion of Grenada, the continuing occupation of Panamas, the continuous occupation of the Persian Gulf since Reagan's regime, the 1990 exercises in Liberia, and, of course, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. These are not battles of self-defense, they are hostile corporate take-over maneuvers. The Iraq Invasion and Occupation is about oil. Nothing more, nothing less. There have been rare humanitarian uses for the US military, but the overwhelming purpose of our armed forces has been to protect American and international corporate interests. In other words, working class kids are being sent to die or be wounded to protect the investments of our ruling elite.

It's a lot less inspiring to admit that one has wasted and corrupted the best years of one's life fighting to protect the wealth and power of oil company executives, DuPont's rubber plantations, Chiquita's bananas and pineapples, or to control Third World economies so that even more jobs can be shipped to sweat factories in places that don't bother with livable wages, OSHA, or democratic governments. As uninspiring as that is, most of the time Americans are doing just that in our military "services."

It's common knowledge inside the military that the various "services" are more committed to protecting their own interests over that of the nation. The constant shuffling of double-dipping military officers into the military-industrial corporations they were assigned to monitor is a national shame and embarrassment. When institutions become huge, it's almost impossible for them to remain focused on their real mission. The US military passed huge about five generations ago and is now such a monstrous proportion of the national employment and budget that it more often seems to believe the existence of the military is the national mission.

"Be all you can be" applied to the mission of "fighting for your corporation" takes on an interesting meaning. For example, a huge part of the national budget is the cost of maintaining a military, military pensions, and military health care. Obviously, the military serves the orders of corporate America without question, but what would it do to the character of those services if corporate America were obligated to pay for that service? Currently, every man, woman, and child, is going into debt to the tune of $5,000/year for our military expenditures. What kind of sense does that make? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to obligate the people who get the advantage of that government service for the cost of the service(s)?

On the other hand, if only corporations receive the protection of the US military, who protects the nation? If corporate interests control military operations, what would keep them from using their military against US citizens? If the military is owned, controlled, and directed so completely by corporate interests, how is military service a patriotic act?

Many Vietnam veterans discovered that they were more able to serve their country from outside of the military. The most patriotic veterans joined organizations such as Veterans for Peace, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Rolling Thunder, Military Families Speak Out, Gold Star Families for Peace, and Patriots for Peace to object to the use of military force for corporate purposes. In this time of challenge to democracy, the Bill of Rights, Constitutional government, true patriots have to carefully consider which side of the battlefield they choose when our "of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation" government goes to war.

November 2008

#109 Legal Recreational Drugs (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

The current federal administration and Minnesota's state governor and big fans of Reagan's War on Drugs.  The argument seems to be that any drug that doesn't make a drug company exec (political contributor) rich causes irreparable damage to society.  Once upon a time, I thought the conservatives' anti-drug case was based on the conservative terror that somewhere someone might be having fun.  Not anymore.  As long as the people having fun are rich, old, white and fat, we're likely to promote their case with an advertising campaign.

Today it's obvious that money is the core to the War on Drugs.  Recreational drugs are the hot sellers in several drug companies' product lines.  If Viagra isn't a free-from-social-value recreational drug, marijuana has to be one of the most beneficial medicines ever discovered.  Pfizer's Viagra (and it's recreational buddies Celextra, Lilly's Cialis, Senetek's Invicorp, Bayer's Levitra, Propecia, Alprostadil, Uprima, and the never ending, constantly growing list of male erectile enhancement drugs) have only one function; to help old fat white men get a hard-on so that they can engage in recreational sex.  If that isn't a meaningless recreational drug, I can't imagine what kind of definition you would use for "recreational drugs."  No activity on this planet could be much less critical to the quality of life on this planet than old fat white guys wallowing on top of their trophy wives. 

It's interesting that the Bushies' argument to protect the income of their drug peddler buddies isn't doing the job they claim it will do.  All those profits were supposed to inspire drug companies to create more lifesaving drugs, but new drugs are not happening at the speed that they were developed before the current medicine=money culture.  In fact, the creation of new drugs is slowly coming to a halt in the US.  After an incredibly slow start, European medical-use drug development is cranking up in capacity and quality.  In a few years, American drug companies are going to want to have their new "intellectual property" laws defanged so that they can steal the patented work of their European competitors. 

A few years later, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea will join the competition.  Those nations are already providing much of the US manufacturing capacity.  Our lazy, greedy executive class gave away the computer business by "teaching" those countries how to manufacturer, design, and market personal computers.  Those same fools are repeating their mismanagement foolishness with drugs.  The upside is, since US manufacturers have dedicated themselves to creating and selling recreational drugs, we have to hope that the rest of the world will take up their slack and develop drugs for medical purposes.

In the meantime, American dope peddlers are pumping out recreational sex drugs, spending millions on television ads promoting their dope, and spending millions bribing docs and politicians to keep the pipeline open between their dope-peddling docs and the dope-abusing, impotent, fat, old white men.  You have to suspect that the Mafia is getting jealous.  In the past, when the Mob gets jealous they get political and violent (as if there is a difference).  I wonder if we're about to be entertained by gang wars between drug companies and street dope peddlers?  That would be fun. 

What's the beef about recreational drugs?  Don't ask me.  I dislike all of our "victimless crime" laws.  If people want to dope themselves into oblivion, even death, as long as they don't take anyone else down with them, I could care less.  Life is hard, humans are grossly over-represented in the world's animal population, resources are dwindling, and you could make about 4 billion arguments as to why people should be allowed to dope themselves into oblivion.  The world economy is such a mess that most people have two choices, sell themselves to the highest bidder or die.  Prostitution is only a crime when a rich man doesn't make a profit from it.  Employees are prostituting themselves to the employers every day.  Men and women have been sacrificing their health and time to employers for hundreds of years but nobody seems to think that is a moral crime.  It's only a crime when someone makes the sale without an employer middleman taking most of the profit.  The ultimate prostitute is a soldier.  Not only does a soldier offer his own life for money, but he'll take other, often innocent, lives for the same hard cash.  But that well populated with victims occupation is often honored in our cultures.  In our current "war," which is waged to steal the oil resources of North Africa, we're forcing National Guard members (who, mostly, got into the guard as a way to get to play with expensive toys, pretending to be soldiers, for extra cash, as a pointless part-time job) to kill and die for money.  A little recreational drug use, in comparison to that activity, has to be qualified as harmless.

My complaint about the Viagra-strain of recreational drugs is the inconsistency displayed by a culture that allows its ruling class legal access to recreational drugs and turns violent when the working class expects the same courtesy.  The rich can drink and drive without expecting serious consequences when they kill bystanders.  They can have meaningless―and conceptually disgusting―old man sex and have their dope choices sanctified by national televised advertising campaigns.  If someone grows a single marijuana plant in his backyard, federal and state SWAT teams will descend from black, noiseless helicopters to burn the crop, confiscate the grower's property, and imprison everyone in the neighborhood who might have "profited" by the illegal substance.  If we actually set out to create an irrational society with an incomprehensible Through the Looking Glass legal system, we couldn't have done a better job. 

#57 Lighting Dark Days (2001)

All Rights Reserved © 2001 Thomas W. Day

I suspect that most of my readers would like to think that I'd have the good sense and taste to stay away from writing a Rat Rant about the awful September 11 catastrophe in New York and what it has done to democracy and common sense. I wish it were true. Good sense and taste may be qualities that I was born without.

The nation suffered a senseless loss of innocent life and that's being disrespected by a loud outpouring of nationalism disguised as, and mistaken for, patriotism. Politicians and citizens are proving themselves to be completely unaware of the positive things this nation stands for, in their desire to return to the days of believing that we're immune to the dangers of this world. All the while, fools and cowards are pretending to be patriotic in wishing for that pathetic fantasy.

"The world has changed," they rant. "The rules are different." And so on.

Citizens are offering up their basic rights, the things that make the United States the unusual place that it is, in exchange for an illusion of cocoon-like safety. Politicians are offering an unlimited collection of new laws that will take away precious freedom, replacing individual rights and responsibility with a more powerful, less responsible government. There appears to be a wholesale rush to outlaw the very things the terrorists dislike the most about the United States. In Minnesota, we have a state senator who is pushing an amendment requiring the Cold War's pledge to the flag in schools. She claims that the practice of idolatry and fearful submission to ritual will teach children how to be an American.

I, obviously, have my doubts. I grew up in the age when chanting the pledge was common and required in K-12 public schools and some universities. I remember, in the heart of the Cold War, how few of us paid attention to the words we were forced to speak. I remember the joy that some teachers demonstrated when they found some reason to punish those of us who improperly idolized the flag. I, mostly, remember that this practice had nothing to do with the things we should have been learning about our nation's history and the foundations of our freedoms. I remember that the most "patriotic" educators didn't seem to know much about American history, the concepts contained in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, or the "founding fathers" they so often referred to but could not name. In my formal education, those important factors were so abandoned that I had to learn them on my own, outside of school and through fortunate accidents.

The words and concepts that we all need to repeat and understand are considerably more complex and valuable than the obedience chant contained in The Pledge. In my heart I believe that our somewhat flawed Constitution of the United States and our nearly perfect Bill of Rights are the words we all need to learn and understand. Through more than two hundred years of being right and, sometimes, very wrong, this country has been guided by the moral concepts expressed in those few words. Without the Bill of Rights, we would have degenerated into a stagnant monarchy or a degenerate theocratic dictatorship at any one of the mildly difficult times during the last 200 years. Without the Constitution, our government would have been indistinguishable from those of the rest of the world. We may yet give up that identity.

At the heart of all this fear is the fact that we Americans (Canada included--Mexico probably not) are practically universally hated by the rest of the world. Even by our "friends." There are good and stupid reasons for that hatred. An acquaintance, a slightly-redneck, ex-Desert Storm trooper, voiced his defense for riding a noisy, gas-guzzling, 180 mph crotch-rocketing motorcycle on the public streets. He wrote that the war in Iraq was about defending our American "right to be excessive" and that he was damned well going to freely exercise that "right."

The Right to be Excessive is a big part of our national character. Our dinky 5% of the world's population is chewing up something like 85% of the world's natural resources. Our main gripe about the Koto global warming accord was that we're arrogant enough to argue that we ought to be able to exchange our right to continue polluting the world's air in exchange for paying a few third world countries to remain non-industrialized. In that way, we could "trade" our current level of pollution for their current level of clean air; and keep doing what we've been doing without restriction.

We attempted to "manage" Mid-Eastern radicalism and Muslim isolationism by pitting Iraq against Iran and supplying weapons to both sides to fuel that diversion. When Saddam and Iraq got bored with Iran's primitive capabilities and decided to do a little freelancing against Kuwait, we squashed that ambition without a thought for how our presence would be perceived in an area that has never been particularly pro-American. September 11 is a reflection of that Mid-Eastern perception.

In our better moments, we believe that spreading the word about our form of socialized-capitalism will improve the world. We want to encourage the backward folk of the world to liberalize their economic and social systems to provide rights and opportunity for all men and women (women's rights are a particular sticking point with Mid-Easterners and most fundamentalists). In our more common moments, we want to maintain free markets for our products and access to everyone's natural resources for our comfort and entertainment. Neither of these motivations makes us a lot of friends in foreign government and religion.

The drive for and necessity of American access to foreign oil is at the heart of our presence in North Africa and southern Asia. We're not promoting democracy and human rights nearly as much as we're keeping our pipes in their oil fields. Kuwait was a totalitarian theocratic monarchy and we "defended" their right to remain as oppressive as they liked, as long as we got their oil output.

Our recent economic lesson has appeared to escaped much notice. The airlines stopped using burning petroleum to ferry the rich, frivolous, and timid across the country, after September 11, and the price of fuel for the rest of us dropped from $1.80 a gallon to $1.15; and continued falling until all the war activity drove it back up to $1.50 at the time of this Rant. Why this doesn't bother the average American, I can't imagine. So let me say it another way and maybe you'll get it: The small number of citizens who can afford to fly on gas guzzling airlines are subsidized by the rest of us, to the tune of increasing fuel costs by more than 50%. The media, the government, and executives are whining about how their fear of flying is stagnating the nation's economy, because they've enjoyed this luxury at the expense of the rest of us and it really bothers them that toy has been ruined. But what we ought to notice is how much the use of that toy has cost all of us. And we ought to do something about it.

That something is to take advantage of a war-time economy and put some resources into changing the way we effect the rest of the world. The technology to change from oil-based engine systems to hydrogen-based systems is practically in our hands. A variety of manufacturers and airlines have experimented with hydrogen-powered jet engines and they work. They, also, don't make effective flying bombs, since hydrogen does not have the explosive and incendiary capability of jet fuel. Hydrogen engines don't contribute to global warming, air pollution, or excessive use of non-renewable resources. With the kind of effort we put into fooling around in Cold War space, we could eliminate our need for foreign oil in a decade.

If we want to truly honor the loss and sacrifice of September 11, 2001, we will end our dependence on foreign oil, especially Mideastern oil, and we will change the way humans generate energy and use resources. The Islamic radicals think this is a holy war. We could make it one by playing this game on a different board. We could do something truly holy and act to preserve this world, our country, and to create a new energy economy that doesn't rely on propping up corrupt and vicious oil dictatorships, monarchies, theocracies, and international corporations.

Subversion, via the Rat hole.

We could do it. We could put ourselves in a position where we don't need the oil producing cartel. They sure as hell need us, because their system hasn't created anything more complex than castles in the sand in the last thousand years. If we really want to create a democratic and representative world, the first step will be to only do business with those who are democratic and representative.

That's a good rule in business, too: only do business with folks you like and who like you. What we middle class, United States citizens need to do is to direct our government to put us in a position where we don't have to do business with people who hate us. Even more, we should be picking the folks with whom we're taking to bed.

There are more than two ways to react to a threat. We can march mindlessly off to war, or we can shut the enemy out of the world economic game. Without us providing their food and materials, most of the oil producing countries are incapable of making their own light bulbs (I would include most of Texas and all of Alaska in that group.). One of those options would be a death blow to the enemy's economic base. The spillover from a traditional war will just make more enemies and put us further in oil debt.

Quote for the week: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." Abraham Lincoln

October, 2001

Creating Power, Creating Community

My wife and I attended an event at a small St. Paul Library last night. This was an old Carnegie library building in one of the older parts of the city, so it's one of the many libraries on the Ramsey Country Library Board's chopping block. This old library reminded me of the primary purpose of public libraries; creating communities.

This local library has been, obviously, starved for resources, but it still keeps attracting neighbors and serving the local community. In fact, the only way to stop a library like this from being used is to close its doors.

This community-building value is a purpose that modern politicians have either forgotten or one that they oppose. It's hard to tell which. For example, our local library politicians are creating a monolith of a library that will be a monument to government excess and community consolidation. When it's finished, the new Roseville Library will suck resources from every other Ramsey County Library until the library board begins to close those small libraries to make room in the budget for the one-and-only-library the country will be able to afford to keep open. Ramsey County is following the incompetent example of Minneapolis, because that's what mismanagement does. One mistake deserves another.

All of this is a good thing for the overpaid, underworked, completely useless bureaucrats who mismanage the country's resources. A giant building means giant management salaries, which means larger salaries for the politicians who mismanage the bureaucrats, which means higher taxes, which means a more stressed, less connected community, which continues the cycle of abuse and incompetence.

As in the business world, the word "leadership" has lost all meaning in government. Conservative characters like Pawlenty gabber about "responsible government" while building monuments to bureaucratic incompetence as fast as they can borrow the money to do so. Their only concern is packing the pockets of their supporters and themselves, while doing as much damage to communities as possible. The weaker, the less informed, the less educated the voters are, the easier they are to mislead. Shredding the value of public libraries to local communities is just part of this tactic.

In a few years, when the United States becomes a minor world power, broke and stagnate and paralyzed by incompetence and politics, the rest of the world will study how we came to such a low state and wonder how anyone could have not anticipated this future. The route from superpower to disaster zone is one of history's most repeated stories. Here we go again.