Astonishing & Perverse

San Francisco is experiencing a building boom driven by the desire of Silicon Valley types for high-priced condos and luxury apartments. Rent controlled buildings are being sold to developers and the tenants evicted; it’s unlikely that many of these tenants will be able to afford places in the new or refurbished buildings.

The power of capital.

On the front page of the New York Times I read an article about executive compensation, a hot topic a few years back, when the economy tanked and the financial industry got bailed-out by sucker taxpayers. Even though many CEO’s had made irresponsible bets on exotic financial instruments that cost their companies billions, they were not held accountable, either by forfeiting compensation or by being indicted. The Times article basically said that nothing can be done to slow the pace of CEO compensation; the median increase at the 200 or so largest firms stands at a hefty 16%.

The power of neoliberal policies: the wealthy get ever wealthier.

Not long after I read the Times article I saw a CNN Money report that claimed that 76% of American households exist paycheck-to-paycheck with no funds set aside for misfortune.

Why isn’t this story on the front page of every major newspaper in the country or being seriously debated in the corridors of Congress? This is the real economic story of our time – the chronic financial insecurity of the majority of American families. It’s obvious and it’s everywhere, and the corporate media could care less. Watching CEO pay skyrocket out of proportion to what one individual is worth to a firm is much sexier.

Working people in America Incorporated are an afterthought, as disposable as a used tampon. Our corporate fathers crushed the unions, exported our jobs, and devalued work. The United States Chamber of Commerce and hundreds of think tanks helped by providing the philosophic underpinnings: wealth is moral, greed is normal, and exploitation is the natural order of the universe. Unfettered by regulation and law, the best will rise to the top, where they naturally belong. The poor have no one to blame but themselves. Lack of industry, moral fiber, self-control and initiative, that’s the problem of the poor.

Everyone can be rich in America!

Nobody ever mentions that the game is rigged, not the New York Times or CNN or ABC. State lotteries are the wealth plan of most Americans. Win the big Powerball and you too can own six homes, a private jet, and a fleet of luxury cars, diamonds, stocks and bonds.

But that’s what separates most of us from the elite few – we hope for a big score against impossibly long odds while the elite cements a guaranteed return by rigging the table. They call it tax “relief” or other quaint euphemisms like “no-bid” contract; they stow their money in offshore accounts invisible to the prying eye of the IRS. It’s a game and they have mastered its rules.

Here’s the bottom line: socialize risk, privatize reward.

Jobs and wages are the real economy, where the majority of us live and breathe – and struggle. We don’t need an economist to tell us that when wages stay flat for more than thirty years, while the cost of health care and education and housing rises, a working person has little chance of doing anything but live paycheck-to-paycheck. He or she can do that dead-end dance, or work two or three jobs and relinquish any hope of achieving a quality of life.  

What the powerful have done to the American Dream is as astonishing as it is perverse. 

Dark Corners

As far as I can tell, Edward Snowden didn’t sell classified information to a foreign power or group, nor was he working for a foreign power. Snowden blew the whistle on what he considered illegal actions committed against American citizens by the NSA for reasons of his own.

Although Snowden didn’t commit an act of espionage, the Obama administration has charged him under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Obama likes the Espionage Act and has used it more than any other modern president.

It’s interesting to watch the ruling class – government officials and media -- close ranks over Edward Snowden. You have the president claiming that the NSA spying program is transparent because its activities have been reviewed and approved by the FISA court – a secret court. You hear Dianne Feinstein spouting gibberish about national security like a newly minted fascist.

But my favorite has to be Mike Rogers, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who said Edward Snowden stole information that belongs to the American people. Yeah, Rogers trotted that BS line out. If the information belongs to us, why didn’t we know it existed until Edward Snowden leaked information about it to Glenn Greenwald?

Like a number of other high level government officials, Mike Rogers also spewed some hogwash about how the “bad guys” around the world have already changed their tactics in response to Snowden’s revelations. This is ludicrous. Terrorists around the world knew the NSA and the CIA and the DIA and the FBI and a bevy of private contractors were spying on them; what the terrorists didn’t know is the same thing the American people didn’t know -- that these entities were also spying on Americans.

The American government got its fat hand stuck in the cookie jar, and now it is frantically trying to pull it out, say it never happened, claim that what we see and hear is wrong. How can we believe a young, narcissist like Edward Snowden over assertions made by Dianne Feinstein and key officials of the national security apparatus?

I for one don’t trust my government to walk the thin line that divides necessary intelligence collection from invasive and indiscriminate collection, the line that separates the need for secrecy from the public’s right to know what is being done in our name, and, most important of all, the line that recognizes that dissent, debate and vigorous protest are necessary elements in a functioning democracy. 

Our political system is sclerotic and our media hopelessly corrupt, and I have no confidence that our leaders can protect us from terrorists without resorting to domestic oppression, or without demonizing whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, or having corporate media blowhards like David Gregory of NBC question the motives of a journalist like Glenn Greenwald. Gregory is a corporate and government lapdog, an access junkie who will never do anything to put that access at risk; Gregory and any number like him don’t report stories, they parrot the talking points handed to them.

The Obama administration talks endlessly about how transparent and open it is, but in reality this administration is hazardous to the health of investigative journalists.

Real journalists challenge the carefully constructed lies peddled by the powerful. Robert Scheer, Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers, Jeremy Scahill, Robert Fisk and Chris Hedges have the courage to question the prevailing wisdom, the facile government line, and the outright lies that flow from Washington D.C. and corporate boardrooms like raw sewage.

In an age of hyper-secrecy, we need investigative journalists brave enough to shine a torch into the darkest corners of the American Empire.

A Commercial Opportunity

I don’t remember when the Summer Solstice parade in Santa Barbara morphed from a largely organic, hippie celebration of the sun and the beginning of summer, to a commercialized “event.” I remember attending the parade when it was young, unique, different, weird, sometimes outrageous, and seeing more recent versions that have been sterilized for out-of-towners.

Yes, there is still plenty of bare flesh to be seen, wild costumes, painted faces, body art, head pieces, but where the parade ends at Alameda Park, there is a sign announcing an ATM machine, and booths selling handicrafts, hats, jewelry, posters, and t-shirts; there is Area 51, a local band, playing on a professional stage with a mixing board; and, though the organizers call it a “garden,” it’s really an aluminum pen where overpriced beer is sold. Lines for beer and food – ranging from gyros to Jamaican jerked chicken to Chinese to Mexican – are long and slow moving. In fact, before one can buy a burrito one must stand in line to buy tickets – ten tickets for $10. One quickly has the sense that this celebration of the sun is really a barely disguised commercial opportunity. But we’re all used to that now, right? It’s the same reason the Christmas season starts on Halloween’s heels.

Judging by gray hair, worry lines, knee braces and faded tattoos, many have come to Solstice to relive the 1960’s, when the young were in their ascendancy and almost anything seemed possible, including significant changes to the American capitalist order. In addition to questioning why the United States was bombing the shit out of Vietnamese peasants, young folks questioned our economic and social arrangements, why almost every facet of American life had to be organized around the dollar and cutthroat competition.

Others in attendance, considerably younger and in the full flower of Youth & Beauty might be here to get a taste of what those heady years were like. Although it’s sunny and warm, many young women are wearing knee high leather boots or ungodly ugly UGG boots with short-shorts or short skirts. Packs of shirtless young bucks are on the prowl, flexing their muscles and six-pack abs, impervious to dangerous UV rays. Area 51 is jamming some funk, the beer is flowing in the pen, and plenty of tickets are being converted into tacos and sandwiches and ice cream.

The ATM sign bothers me and I can’t stop thinking about it -- symbolic, to me anyway, of everything that has gone awry in Santa Barbara and the rest of the nation. Perhaps I’m just bitter, pining for a hometown that never was. Boom or bust my working class circumstances haven’t changed. I was born too late to catch the apex of the 60’s, some of the hope and optimism that died with the Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and the election of Richard Nixon. I missed the high water mark described by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. I didn’t see the great wave crash, but I did watch it recede. 

Addicted

No surprise that the United States is charging Edward Snowden under the old Espionage Act. Figured that was coming. Now my government will pressure the authorities in Hong Kong to arrest Snowden and turn him over for the full American legal treatment. Snowden is ruined. The heavy book of punishment is sailing at his head.

The annual budget of the NSA is classified, of course, but I read somewhere that it must be in the cul de sac of eight or ten billion dollars. Here’s the ironic thing about that: the American taxpayers pay the NSA to spy on them. We pay the tab for the NSA’s toys, personnel, private contractors, everything. Jesus.

Spying is very useful for the government and corporations; the government gets tons of information it uses to track people it thinks might pose a threat to the republic, like rabid environmentalists and political dissenters, and the corporations make pots of money.

Some of the NSA’s budget is justified – it is a dangerous world populated with numerous crazies – even a die-hard liberal like me can see that, but a lot of the budget is clearly overkill and overreach. Would those excess billions be used for education and healthcare and infrastructure projects in our cities, for investment in people and creating a real economy of work and wages! Too bad it won’t happen. Proponents of a real economy cannot afford high-priced lobbyists, and they don’t typically have the jack to make huge campaign contributions; in other words, they can’t play the Washington game of give and get, pay and play.

I wonder, sitting here in the California sunshine on a June day, if what is now happening in Brazil will eventually happen here. The poor and middle class in Brazil have signaled, by pouring into the streets by the thousands, that they are sick and tired of being treated like chumps by the elite. Brazil is that interesting unequal society where a wood and aluminum slum sits next to a luxury high-rise protected by private security forces. The poor depend on public services, but find those services meager, and the fact that the government and the elite are spending billions to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics pisses them off.

The rich do what they want, the poor suck it up until they can’t take anymore of the rigged game.

As Hunter S. Thompson used to say, Selah. The rich and powerful never learn the value of moderation; power is the most addictive drug of all, and once you taste it and get hooked, there’s no going back to coach class.

Trust Us

“America holds auctions, not elections.” William O’Connor

So, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirmed what most semi-awake people already knew – the NSA is sweeping up gobs of information about American citizens.

The government has egg all over its face because of past assurances that the NSA wasn’t spying on Americans.

The din over Snowden is loud and confused; some call him a traitor and demand his head on a platter; others say he is a hero who acted on his conscience to expose a threat to democracy itself; and of course the smear campaign against him is well underway with some talking heads and pundits branding him as a narcissist and self-aggrandizer.

It’s difficult for an ordinary citizen to sort this one out. The Obama administration claims nothing is amiss with the NSA’s spying program, that in addition to being perfectly legal (as opposed to being morally right), it has been invaluable in foiling various terrorist plots. As with most claims by Obama’s spin masters, little evidence is offered to back up the assertion. We’re urged to believe that our government – and the many unaccountable corporations who are part and parcel of the global security state – would never misuse their access to the information of ordinary citizens.

In other words, the public should trust the NSA in the same way we should trust Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and Bank of America and BP and Exxon Mobil and Chevron, because none of these powerful behemoths has ever plunged a knife in our back.

In the aftermath of 9/11, when collective insanity reigned and moderate voices were drowned out by hysteria, and bloodthirsty Muslim extremists were hiding in every shadow, Congress misplaced its spine and cowered before Dick Cheney and relinquished too much power to the executive branch. Under the guise of security, most Americans were more than willing to trade basic civil liberties; and now we can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle. The surveillance state is too large, vast, interconnected, and profitable to be scaled back.

Too much power, of any sort, in too few hands is a tried and true recipe for tyranny.

Riding the Down Escalator

My last post, Dibs and Dabs, was pure shit, an embarrassment. I apologize to the six people who read it. What a cluster. Not sure what I was thinking.

But that’s the hazard of being an obsessive, self-indulgent blogger. A lot of the time all I do is litter the electronic stage with drivel and crap. I’ve been writing this blog for almost ten years and I think the time has come to demolish the balcony and sell the metal for scrap. I’m running out of things to bitch, moan and whine about; maybe I’m content. How did this happen?

Yes, the government of the United States, a purported Democracy, spies on its citizens; the Hydra-headed security state monitors our telephone calls and studies our e-mail messages and Facebook and Twitter posts.

Yes, our economic arrangements are absurd and inhuman, deliberately rigged in favor of the haves at the expense of the have-nots. I accept that this is a nation separate and unequal, and that the American Dream of upward mobility is dead for all but the wealthy and well connected; the rest of us are riding the down escalator, wondering how low it will take us.

Yes, the United States is the most feared nation on the planet. We have cruise missiles and drones and a massive intelligence apparatus, and numerous ways to project military power into places where we have no business operating. We trample the sovereignty of other nations with impunity; we swagger as only a true hypocrite can, and congratulate ourselves for being the baddest bully on the block.

And, so what?

The sun rises and sets, the neighbors get up in the morning and go to work or school or wherever, and my family does the same. My sixteen-year-old son is morose and brooding, temperamental and surly; my eleven-year-old daughter must be pushed or pulled out the door with her backpack and lunch bag dragging on the ground, her hair tangled and her Converse untied. My kids tie me in knots -- I love them, of course, the trouble is I just don’t understand them. Who are these opinionated and demanding little people? Why are they so dissatisfied with their young lives, their schools, and their friends? I tell myself that I was different at their age, but I was probably even more pig-headed, obstinate, stubborn, rude, and obnoxious. I was a shit, pure and simple. Guilty as charged. I pulled plenty of stupid stunts. One of these days I’ll reach back in my memory and write about some of my dim-witted pranks and pratfalls.

In the meantime, I hold on here on the American Riviera, on the north end of Milpas street. My luck is running pretty good. Life could be much worse.

Dibs & Dabs

Sting is playing the County Bowl tonight and the crowd is filing in. The marine layer was heavy all day, but the sky is clear now and it looks like a pleasant evening for a concert. Music beneath the stars in Santa Barbara. The crowd is mostly white, affluent looking, and orderly. These people don’t shout and whistle like the lower classes do for other acts, and the police haven’t seen fit to roll out additional units to maintain the peace. Sting is safe, mellow, not a menace to public safety. Our local gangbangers don’t care about Sting.

My government is going to prosecute Bradley Manning to the hilt and lock the young man away for life. So long, whistleblower, we’ll show you what becomes of people who spill state secrets. Straight into the American Gulag, never to be heard from again. Once we’re done with you, we’ll figure out a way to get your mate, Assange. He can’t hide in the Ecuadorean embassy forever; sooner or later he’ll slip up, and when he does, we’ll have him snatched and extradited, and he’ll get the full Cheney treatment. He won’t act so cocky when we ram a cattle prod up his rectum. Teach him to fuck with the U S of A.

It’s a wonderful world. The sky is blue, cloudless, and Sting is playing the Bowl. High heels echo off the sidewalk. Date night at the Bowl, overpriced chardonnay in clear plastic glasses. What could be better? Early summer on the American Riviera.

Sting has begun his show with a familiar tune but I couldn’t name it if my life depended on it.

People come, people go. Death on the installment plan, death in dibs and dabs, death in aging pop stars and memories of days gone by the boards. Sting on MTV, long ago and far away. Do they even show music videos on MTV now? What would Madonna have been without MTV? The illusion of reality is the greatest illusion of all. I’m sure I’ve been here before, in another life, another body. I bought this ticket, and I’ll take the ride to the end of the line. Maybe it will end in a small village high on a mountain, with a stream in the valley below where a man can fish for trout. Smell of pine and wood smoke. The locals keep to themselves. The train clatters down the mountain, disappears beneath the trees. Or maybe the train runs out of track on a wide, flat desert, plows into the sand, stops dead. The end of nowhere; cactus and buzzards and the malevolent sun.

Sting plays on. I can’t even hear the crowd. Darkness is falling, slowly, like a dream.