The Truth about the Tea Party

            The great disadvantage of an incumbent today is that facts are available. President Obama has a very public record of his presidency; Romney does not. In a nation that embraces facts only when they are convenient, the candidate with the most reality attached is at a distinct disadvantage.  The most glaring reality available today is an 8.3% unemployment rate. It is the albatross that weighs Obama down.

            Never mind the fact the Tea Party was created as soon as Obama arrived in the White House. Made to look like a grass roots movement, it was funded and orchestrated from the beginning by the likes of David Koch, an American oil baron, who, among others, was not about to let a pragmatic black man run the show. Even though Obama inherited the worst economic mess since the 1930’s, the very people who created the mess would quickly use the artificially inseminated grass roots trick called the Tea Party to make sure Obama’s solutions would not work. By installing Tea Party candidates in the House by 2010, the blockade was successfully erected. No further Keynesian solutions would be allowed. The “market” would be restored as mover and shaker and this uppity community organizer out of the wrong side of Chicago would be thwarted and neutered.

            What the Tea Party has been taught to fear more than anything is a powerful government. If government could actually succeed in reversing all the damage done by bubble and bust laissez-faire capitalism on the loose, the high stakes games played by the fast and loose players on Wall Street and the corporate big guys like Koch would be curtailed. They no longer would be able to generate bubbles as large and profitable as they once had.

            Meanwhile, thanks to voices such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News brainwashers, the lowly soldiers of the Tea Party are convinced that their self-interests are the same as the Wall Street gamers and corporate giants and that government is the problem. The truth is corporations such as Wal-Mart and Target have had a much greater negative impact on small businesses throughout the country than government ever could.  And yet the small businessman has been taught to see big business as a big brother rather than his destroyer. Unlike the unemployment statistic, there is no comparable index that measures the job or small business loss through Big Box economic oligarchy.

            The dimming myth of the American Dream is kept alive by the same trick that gets statistically impaired people to buy lottery tickets. You, too, can be a winner. All you have to do is play. Target and Wal-Mart are simply the current winners. Your turn is just around the corner. With hard work and a little luck, your business can become another Home Depot. The only thing that stands in your way is…government. That’s like blaming the referee for your winless or mediocre season.

            Let’s call Big Box stores Big Boxers. In the sport of boxing there are weight classes. The heavyweights do not box the bantamweights. In capitalism it’s a free-for-all where all weight classes are in the same arena, small businesses and large. The only hope for the small business is that a heavyweight does not come to town and pummel the lightweight with prices and variety it cannot possibly match.

            The American Dream was once most broadly alive during the Eisenhower administration when taxes on the rich were about 90%. Employment was high, home ownership was on the rise, and the difference between the wages of the average worker and the CEO were about what they are in Japan today: CEOs made twenty times what the average worker made.  Today,  a president, who is labeled a socialist by today’s extreme right (the Tea Party folks), is actually right of Eisenhower in relative conservatism. But the American public has been sitting in the ever increasingly conservative cauldron for the last three decades like the frog in the proverbial pot of boiling water and failing to notice that their American Dream is dying a slow death.

            It is time to wake up, America, to the truth. Stop being true believers shaped by Wall Street and big business. They are pursuing their self-interests, not yours. And their self-interests have become all-powerful. Your only hope is a more powerful referee, not the absence of one.       

                

               

             

Invisible Hands

            Adam Smith first linked to markets the idea of the invisible hand in his work The Wealth of Nations which came out in 1776, the year 13 American colonies declared independence. He had introduced the concept in an earlier work The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), but markets and capitalism had not been discussed in the earlier work. The idea, which has renewed currency today, is that in a free market greater good is achieved by free exchange of goods and services because prices are driven lower by competition and products are improved in the process. Therefore, society as a whole benefits from the pursuit of selfish interests by individuals.

            What Adam Smith never dreamed of was that competition would become something to be eliminated. Increasing market share by any means would undermine competition. By the early twentieth century John D. Rockefeller, Chairman of Standard Oil, is accused of saying: “Competition is a sin.”

            Furthermore, the sophistication of finance and advertising in addition to the development of large scale industry would reduce competition considerably. Corporations on a large scale, especially multi-national ones, would shed all pretense of competition and strive to command a market share so significant that their annual budgets would rival those of many noteworthy countries. Today, these gigantic corporations have a life of their own and declare allegiance to the country with the lowest taxes.

            Finally, these huge corporate entities have been blessed with "personhood" and subsequently given their own veil of secrecy in the form of a Citizens United ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. This ruling gives them the capacity to spend their astronomical resources on disinformation campaigns against American political candidates they dislike and for candidates they support without ever disclosing who they are. It is, in effect, another invisible hand, not one intended by Adam Smith.

            The election of 2012 is in danger of being decided by the latter invisible hand in honor of the preservation of the first. The second hand serves the trickle-down notion of the greater good by funding candidates that favor laissez-faire capitalism and therefore believe in the first invisible hand. What a neat trick. I can hear it now: the sound of two invisible hands clapping across two centuries. I guess Machiavelli would approve, but would Adam Smith?

Nooks and Crannies

            Thomas’s English muffins were on sale at Safeway today, so I bought a couple of boxes. As I stood at the kitchen counter to pry open a fresh muffin with a fork, I thought of the ad the company uses to promote its muffins: nooks and crannies. In actuality the nooks and crannies are the bubbles that get baked into the muffins. In other words, they are empty space, not product. And yet the company has convinced us that these nooks and crannies are good somehow. They hold more jelly or peanut butter than denser muffins because of the nooks and crannies. You, the consumer, of course, fill in the gaps, cover the spread. 

            I actually prefer Bay’s muffins, which are easier to pry apart, denser, and tastier than Thomas’s, but I have nooks and crannies imbedded in my psyche thanks to the conditioning I received long ago by vigorous advertizing, and I occasionally buy the less satisfying muffins out of a latent Pavlovian response to slogans and discounts. 

            Nooks and crannies remind me of the Tea Party and the political reforms it is trying to “serve” or less euphemistically “shove down our throats.” When I think of muffins I think of crackers as well, and both can accompany the serving of tea. And when I think of crackers I imagine “southern crackers,” a major component of Tea Party membership. 

            The economic theory that the Tea Party folks hold very dear starts out looking like a Thomas’s English muffin. It not only has nooks and crannies, it has rather large craters into which the country could fall and then spend years struggling to escape. It’s amazing what a lot of hot air can do to a muffin and an economy. The Tea Party’s whole notion is based on trickle-down economic theory. It goes like this: if we lower even more the taxes on the rich, and cut services to the poor, the middle class will thrive.

            Whoever Mr. Thomas was, at least his muffin generally holds together in spite of the typical minefield of nooks and crannies. But even Rube Goldberg couldn’t come up with a contraption let alone a muffin that represents the Tea Party trickle-down theory. The nooks and crannies have been replaced by rifts and faults.

            One fault in Tea Party logic is the fact that corporations have been shipping jobs out of the country for decades. The so-called trickle of job creation has been piped overseas. Before we build a pipeline to bring crude oil from Canada to refineries in the South, we need to shut down the pipelines that send jobs abroad.   

            Another fault is the fact that the national debt will not be reduced without both cuts in spending and increased taxes. No neutral assessment says it can be reduced simply by cuts or taxes. And yet the Tea Party insists on a one-sided solution or half a muffin.

            The Tea Party is a posse of supply-siders. They look at the economy from the top down. Somehow they think gravity will cause the trickle downward. Unfortunately they have their heads in the clouds where their funders fly their private jets. They cannot see that the current ground in the U.S. is a desert in many places. Rain may fall from clouds over a desert, but it seldom hits the ground. The clouds are too high-based and the water evaporates long before it can reach the earth. That’s what happens when the rich become so rich they are miles above the hoi polloi and lose contact with the reality of common folks.

            A Grand Canyon of an illusion in the Tea Party theory is that somehow by privatizing public works such as education, health care, and social security, and putting them in the hands of for-profit companies that will compete, somehow their competition will bring down cost. To see so-called competition at work, one needs only to look at the for-profit segment of higher education already in place and the debt with which it has saddled countless struggling upwardly striving young people. These ambitious students are modern day wannabe Horatio Alger stories waiting to succeed, only to have their dreams deferred or even destroyed by overwhelming debt. Corporate colleges are geared to make profits first, and to make short-term profits even sooner.There are many of these "competing" institutions. Just as the sub-prime mortgage vendors duped unsuspecting clients into buying houses they could not afford, so do for-profit colleges dupe their clients into taking out college loans they will spend the rest of their lives paying off. Clearly, privatizing is not the answer. 

            Finally, the Tea Party philosophy is all faith based. It places blind faith in markets as a panacea; it places faith in religions generally run by men to dictate to women how they should live their lives; it places faith in the principle that “that which governs best governs least” unless it has to do with social issues. In other words, it is rather unevenly applied (lots of nooks and crannies) and it wants to cut government spending except for defense, which it insists on increasing to feed the ever cavernous yap of the military-industrial complex.

            America has tried supply-side economics for the last three decades. It has reduced taxes on the rich, and yet the poor are getting poorer and those in the middle class are about to qualify as an endangered species. There are simply too many gaps, canyons, rifts, faults, nooks and crannies in that tired, worn-out theory. It’s time to throw the Tea Party itself overboard and get on with solving America’s problems. The Romney-Ryan ticket is a one way trip in the wrong direction. Romney and Ryan are serving the same old supply-side stale muffin that will surely crumble, it has so many holes in it. Nooks and crannies, indeed.

Up on the Rooftop

Up on the rooftop Seamus paws,

On goes St. Mitt to his own applause,

Down through the years with lots of ploy,

All for the Presidency

Boy O Boy.

Chorus:

Ho, Ho, Ho!

Who’ll ever know!

Ho, Ho, Ho!

Who’ll ever know!

Up on the rooftop

Click, click, click

Down through the years with

Good Saint Mitt.

First Bain Capital, what a trip:

Fills dear Mittens’ money clip;

Off shore deposits, Cayman and Swiss,

Export jobs, he just can’t miss.

Repeat Chorus

Next the governor, what a ride:

Socialized Medicine done with pride;

Now Mitt’s denying it can work for all,

Its clone Obamacare he’ll recall.

Repeat Chorus

Good St. Mitt’s an L. D. Saint

But true to church he really ain’t,

Gambling’s not good Mormon fun,  

Mitt takes dough from Adelson.

Repeat Chorus

Good St. Mitt is a slippery guy

One who easily tells a lie;

Then goes on to deny and deny,

Enough to make pooch Seamus cry.

Repeat Chorus

So Close and Yet So Far

             In Greek mythology Tantalus was condemned to be eternally kept out of reach of plump, luscious fruit dangling overhead. The fruit was tantalizingly close, a situation that spawned the word “tantalize.” Today, we can get all the fresh fruit we want any time of year at Whole Foods, so it’s never a matter of being denied in 21^st Century America if you have the means.  We can also gather all sorts of “friends” on Facebook and tweet to our heart’s content, staying in touch with hundreds of our most tweetable friends.

            Rather than host “at homes” or “tea” for our short list of intimate friends and family as was popular in Victorian times, we seem to find ways to hide from each other in plain sight.  Any packed Starbuck’s Coffee House at any time of day or night will easily display a group of 30 or so folks busily engaged with their iPads, iPhones, or laptops even while seated at the same table with no contact whatsoever with the person most proximate. We have created the illusion of being social butterflies while wrapping our actual lives in technological cocoons. We have become politicians with constituents rather than friends with genuine face-to-face connectedness and intimacy.

            The art of conversation has been lost to “what’s on your mind” postings or tweets rather than real discussion. The polarization of the country has been accomplished because civil discourse has gone the way of the parlor and the dining room. They are vestigial aspects of a former humanity left in the dust by our unwary eagerness to embrace handy tools as ends in themselves. Words were once tools; now they are ammunition, fired at will, blasted out at the world from a vacuous void of thought at distance.

            Investment bankers now sit in front of computer screens and play the stock market with billions of dollars nano-seconds at a clip. It has nothing to do with “investing,” which by definition implies a long term commitment.  It is playing computerized pinball with the world economy so that a few make billions in seconds while the consequences to national economies have been and will continue to be devastating.    

            We even fight wars at a distance so remote, thanks to the technology of drones, that former fighter pilots now sit in offices with computers directing their drones to destroy enemy targets as if war is nothing more than a video game played for real stakes. 

            Our nation’s obesity epidemic is not just the product of too many calories: it is the result of the loss of real human contact and intimacy that technology has enabled. We are starved for the socially fulfilling harvest of real face-to-face relationships instead of Facebook “friending;” the return of slow food family dinners in the dining room; the restoration of neighbors stopping by the front porch to chat; and the Woodstockian reunion of the republic of the United States of America.  

            Our infrastructure has cocooned us in gated communities without neighborhoods, automobiles rather than mass transportation, and rugged individualism rather than cooperation. The higher fruit of a true civilization is just out of reach, and we have put it there by making lesser fruits into gods. Those lesser fruits are full of sugar and have no sustenance. They are full of empty calories that sustain nothing more than empty lives.    

            There is nothing wrong with the technology, per se, it is how we use it and what we expect from it that is profoundly wrong. Perhaps our abuse is a reflection of our overweening emphasis on liberty, rugged individualism, and the culture of “me,” lies that serve as protections against having to look into the face of the other and see the loneliness that we feel.

               

           

Supreme Court Stimulus Package

            Just when you thought free speech had nothing to do with money, the U.S. Supreme Court, or at least part of it, has upheld the right of corporations to spend freely and secretly on political ads even in Montana. You see Montana has tried to keep corporations from having influence on politics ever since the copper mining industry indulged in purchasing votes and politicians about 100 years ago.  However, in the name of free speech, the Supreme Court has kept the corporate political influence geyser blowing money all over Montana.    

            

            While the robed but not hooded court (the conservative 5/9ths of it) has given the go-ahead to Arizona to detain any Latino living in the state who is caught jaywalking until he or she can prove legitimate presence in the state, it has denied Montana the right to prevent undue political influence peddling by corporations in the name of free speech. Who says the court is foolishly consistent. Apparently you can pay for votes indirectly, just not directly. And apparently if you are Latino, you are guilty until you are proven innocent. The big guys in Montana get a bye (or buy), and the little guy who speaks English with an accent gets detained. It’s a neat trick. Big guys get protected; little guys get persecuted.

            The good thing about the political ads on television is that conservatives are pouring millions of dollars into the economy just in time to stimulate it for President Obama’s benefit. As the U.S. economy expands in spite of the European Union’s struggles because of this extraordinary mid-summer stimulus, the U.S. economy will begin looking better and better. 

            Of course no corporations will look at the money pouring into political ads as stimulus. All they can see is the defeat of that socialist/Muslim President Obama, which brings me to comment on that confusing label. Obama can be a Muslim OR a socialist, but not both. Have you ever heard of a socialist Muslim? It’s an oxymoron. The fact is, he is neither, but that does not stop conservatives of one sort or another throwing out labels that contradict each other.

            Ironically, all of that unintended stimulus money will fulfill the Keynesian promise that stimulus, not austerity, will restore the American economy, and it will be funded by none other than the folks who believe just the opposite. That’s an even neater trick.

The Absolute: Ideal Cover for the Dissolute

         Football, the stock market, and the Catholic Church are three examples of ideas that have become cultural holy grails worshiped and revered by loyal fans and followers in America. The most successful in those arenas become heroes and even idols, especially when they profess to represent goodness as well as greatness.
       What we forget is that our institutions are human constructs and are therefore imperfect. When we trust them as if they were absolutes, we put ourselves and especially our most vulnerable at risk. The most respected and revered examples of those institutions affiliated with our most revered ideas become the ideal cover for those who would harm us.
      Penn State was one of the most respected and revered college football programs in the nation. It stood for tradition, integrity, hard work, excellence, and success. Penn State players graduated in high numbers; they generally behaved themselves much better than most; and they played for one of the most revered and respected coaches in the land: Joe Paterno. Jerry Sandusky used that institutional reverence as part of the cover for his pedophilia.
      The most famous Ponzi schemer in the history of the United States, Bernie Madoff, lured many a believer into his scheme because he maintained the appearance of the consummate exclusive, successful, investment manager who produced fantastic results, literally. He became an institution of one that attracted true believers because he was able to sustain for a very long time a charismatic god-like image that provided the perfect cover for his deceit. It is blind faith in the “goodness through growth” of the market system that gave cover to Bernie Madoff’s scam.
       And most egregiously, the Catholic Church continues to cover for what is turning out to be countless pedophiles among its clergy.
       In all three examples the perpetrators used other people’s blind faith in institutions and in ideas as their cover. Therefore, our most cherished beliefs can make us immune to any notion that anything untoward could possibly exist in conjunction with the purity our minds insist on seeing. We fall prey to absolutes because they provide the false but enticing clarity of black and white in the face of a gray world.
      But ultimately it is hope distilled into faith that is our greatest liability as human beings. We get intellectually lazy in some aspect of our lives and begin to rely on faith rather than judgment. We “decide” to stop thinking and simply trust. We transform a part of our relative lives into some sort of absolute. It is comforting for a time, but inevitable reality intrudes. More often than not we choose belief over fact because we are, as humans, foolishly consistent even in the face of change.
       As D.H. Lawrence says, in Studies in Classic American Literature, “Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.” In fact, we make gods of all sorts of things to let ourselves off the hook. Except for sociopaths and psychopaths, who represent a small percentage of the world’s population, we know right from wrong. We learn it by all sorts of means, but we learn it. We continue to learn it throughout life and we act on it regularly when the costs are low. It is when the costs are high, when the power of evil masquerading as goodness is great that we more often than not fail to act. That is why true heroes are rarer than diamonds, and why human evolution is so very slow.
      Maybe rapidly evolving technology will enable us to hold ourselves and others more accountable than has happened in the past. Equipping the whole world with cell phones and cameras may give us the means of capturing more of reality moment by moment and lay waste the cover our hallowed institutions have provided those who would harm. But all the accurate exposure in the world will have little effect if we do not stop making gods out of our own sloth and intellectual resignation or faith out of hope.