A Sign from the Fashion God

Just maybe we are in for an unconventional turn of events in the on-going saga about the world economy. Just as Ground Hog Day is used as a predictor of how much longer winter will last past February 2nd, it now seems that how high women’s heels are is no longer a measure or reflector of how well the economy is doing. In an article I just read in Daily Finance (http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/11/21/low-heels-will-spike-this-winter-countering-recession-trend/) historically, high heels would “spike” during recessions, but this winter, they will go flat according to this article. Did they spike traditionally out of hope, in order to provide a longer view, in order to suggest to the stock market that it too should spike instead of redline? Who knows? What we do know is that the projected lower profile or center of gravity for women’s shoes must be a harbinger of something. In fact, it not only is a reflection of new developments on the horizon, it is very much a precipitous event that will set in motion a chain of events of global proportions.
Perhaps it is merely a reflection of the subconscious acceptance by fashion that the world is becoming flat, as Thomas Friedman predicted in his book, The World is Flat. Or perhaps it is a forecasting indicator that the haves are lowering their profile and preparing to be more like the 99% of the rest of us. Will the “one percenters” still wear spikes, or will they lower themselves and their expectations and regain their humanity in some way? Will they be shamed into being less extravagant in order to appear more modest, even if they keep their 90 percent of the wealth? In any case, low heels are in. Whether or not the well-heeled follow the trend remains to be seen. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said in ‘The Rich Boy”: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
All of this may seem absurd on the surface, and no one wants to be measured by a heel let alone become one. Yet, there is something “freakonomic” about the whole idea. It is taking one aspect of human behavior and trying to apply it to a whole other context. Given the ideas and fears that send the stock market skyrocketing one day and augering in the next, a connection between the height of heels and the economy is not so far-fetched. What it suggests is the human tendency toward cause-effect as the default way secular beings “reason” when we really do not know. Religious beings simply turn to God or the “chosen text” (Bible, Koran, etc) for an answer. In any case, it will be interesting to see how many of us heel to this theory and whether or not it signals any healing in the economy.

Greek Mythology Cannot Hold a Candle

It is no wonder the Greeks are in trouble financially. It all began with ancient Greek civilization and their belief in polytheism. They had all sorts of gods like Zeus, Apollo, Hera, and Poseidon. They were not perfect gods by any means and often imitated human behavior. In other words, they were projections of human beings on a screen writ large and given immortality to boot. Lately, the Greeks turned their will and their lives over to the care of politicians who promised them an Elysian Field full of benefits they could not pay for, and now the Greeks are going to suffer drastically for their folly.
Why is it we humans invite gods into our lives and then allow them to rise and take over our lives? Here in America today we have allowed the development of titan corporations and banks that appear to be headless when you look at them but nonetheless are more powerful than any gods the Greeks could conjure up. America’s gods are real, and they are allowed to run rampant over our thought-processes, our values, and our well-being.
Much of this can be laid at the feet of monotheism. By proclaiming that there is only one true God, we have lain ourselves open to allowing corporations to become real gods in our midst. We cannot see them as such because of our predominant belief system. We cannot believe a corporation could possibly become a god. There is no such thing because there is more than one corporation and there can be only one god. It’s a beautiful set-up for corporations. They can go about the business of gobbling each other up, shipping their profits off-shore, finding cheaper workers in other countries, and swallowing politicians from both parties because corporations have been declared legal persons and therefore are human, not god-like. We cannot see the gods they are because of the human label we have bequeathed.
We have made some of them gods in another way by proclaiming them “too big to fail.” If that isn’t a sign of man-made immortality, then it is a sign that we bow before titans of our own making. Save the god or we’ll all suffer.
We are taught daily, even hourly, to worship the products of the corporate gods. Some of us may go to church for an hour each week, but we spend much more time in front of a TV screen (over four hours each day on average) being told incessantly that we cannot live without product X. You name it: drug, car, beer, cereal, or car insurance, we are taught over and over that we should believe certain products will restore our health, our happiness, our sense of self-worth, and our social net worth. In other words, these corporate products will do for us directly what that church god many Americans pray to will only occasionally if ever do for them.
Some corporations have divvyed up the national politicians according to industry, in some cases, while others buy both sides of the isle to ensure they have influence no matter what. Oil and gas corporations tend to purchase Republicans while Wall Street of late has favored Democrats. Our national and even local political scenes are controlled and marketed by corporate lobbies that barrage the TV networks with “enemy attack” and “pro-industry” advertisements in the guise of what once were public service announcements.
Unions that once championed the working poor have risen to match the god-like power of the corporations and have become self-serving gods in their own right. The NEA, for one, stands in the way of genuine reform of public education in America by protecting bad teachers from being replaced by good ones. Gods have a way of inspiring opposition to match, but it only creates more gods, not fewer.
So the next time you turn on your TV, computer, iphone, or ipad, look for the gods in your life, recognize them for what they are, and begin to think of ways to reduce their influence in your life. The Greeks may have been early to god creation, but America has produced the most powerful titans ever created, and they are very much in our midst today.

A Confederacy of Dunces?

You would think that the Republican Party would put forth a varsity line-up capable of winning a national election. Alas, they are, shall we say, more democratic than they would like to admit. They have allowed just about anyone to run for the highest office, not just some hand-picked lot screened for basic intelligence, general knowledge about the world, and common sense.
Here are some of the latest fumbles, dropped passes, and fouls by various members of the team:
Gingrich……turns out he was paid between 1.6 and 1.8 million dollars by Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored mortgage company he has criticized;
Bachmann…..still hollering about brain damage from HPV vaccine;
Cain……………doesn’t know Libya from Dubya; catches the brain freeze epidemic apparently running rampant through the team; will have trouble attracting women;
Paul……………wants to make friends with Iran;
Perry………….has a brain freeze about one of the three departments he would eliminate if elected;
At this point the two Mormons, Huntsman and Romney, are looking like the epitome of clear-thinking, grounded, science-based, rational pragmatists, even if their chief religious text is the playful target of a sold-out musical sensation on Broadway.
Ever since the Democratic Party moved right of center under Bill Clinton and started taking huge donations from Wall Street to compete with Big Oil donations to Republicans, the Republican Party has had to move even further to the right in order to seem pure and, well, righteous. Actually knowing something has lost its luster. Gone is nuance. Gone are actual facts. It is all about ideology, theology, and strict interpretation of two documents: the Bible and the Constitution.
Ultimately this orthodoxy will enable an actual political centrist like Romney or Huntsman to overcome their peculiar religious orientation and be accepted as mainstream. The nuts on the current team will make the pair look like disciples of Descartes.
What about Santorum, you may ask. His problem is his name. It sounds like an old potion like Geritol or even worse, a toilet bowl cleaner. It also rhymes with forum, and the country has had enough of political forums like the super-committee where nothing gets done. His name is just too chemical/political sounding.
There is someone else I am missing. Ah, yes. The former governor of New Mexico…what’s his name…Johnson. “Send in Johnson” is hardly a battle cry. It simply does not carry. The country is screwed already. We don’t need any more Johnsoning.
Obama, at this point, could be Alfred E. Newman of “What? Me worry?” fame and still win. There is no contest at this point. Maybe when the dust settles, the GOP selection is made, and the real battle begins, we’ll see some rational distinctions to vote on. Meanwhile, the GOP is providing the best entertainment around, except, of course, for that sold-out Broadway musical called “The Book of Mormon.”

When the going gets tough, the tough get going*

If there is an American adage, this is it. The saying is meant to imply that when times are tough, those willing to try harder will succeed. The American creed is about doing and doing it better, faster, and more powerfully.
In World War II General Patton was able to surprise the Nazis time and time again with his superhuman expectations of his troops and their superhuman delivery on those expectations. His Third Army moved faster, covered more ground, surprised more enemy and conquered more territory in less time than any army in history.
When those troops who survived came home to America, they put that work ethic to work rebuilding our economy. Today, American troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have less opportunity to find jobs because expanding American companies have become multinational entities and have shipped jobs abroad that our returning troops might have gotten in the good old days of post-WWII America. While the troops stay loyal to America and continue to risk their lives for our freedom, our largest corporations have abandoned loyalty for profit. Wherever corporations can make profit by lowering labor costs, that is where corporate America goes, and calls it euphemistically a “business decision”; as if that label excuses any hint of abandonment, disloyalty, and lost opportunity for American workers.
The motto of the 21st Century corporation is a corollary to Vince Lombardi’s famous line: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Today multi-national corporations seem to have adopted the notion that “profit isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Once you no longer belong to a country, I guess you lose your loyalty. That’s why so many corporations seek tax shelters off shore.
Whatever happened to corporate civic responsibility? Here is what happened: Corporations got larger; pleasing stockholders became a short-term rather than a long-term goal; labor became expendable rather than honored; and economies became global rather than national. The local company in the local community became obsolete.
While factories were being exported, schools were turned into factories producing athletes and scholars, and the rest be damned. If you were not on a college track either through athletics or academics, you were left behind to pick up skills on your own or you were taught skills that were obsolete by the time you got to the work place.
Meanwhile, the workforce doubled without counting immigrants or population growth. Women entered the work force with the zeal and determination of first generation immigrants, the kind of work ethic we see most noticeably among Mexican and Asian immigrants today.
At the same time, traditional labor jobs disappeared, service jobs exploded. Brains replaced brawn, and women, by and large, fit the bill better than men. Today the American male, by and large, faces a bleak future. Sixty percent of college degree earners at all levels are women. Young men, in many cases, are left behind to hang around sports bars, drink beer, and behave foolishly as TV sports ads teach them to behave.
Unless corporate America starts taking serious responsibility for the unintentional but nonetheless devastating neutering of the average American male, we will be headed for disaster as a culture. Black males are the canary in the mines. They are already in dire straits in great numbers. The rest of the male population is not far behind.
I call on the Republican politicians to stop deceiving America and themselves by preaching the problem will be solved by lower taxes. Lower taxes will not solve unemployment if the educational system is broke and broken already and there is a large pool of unemployable (skill-less) folks out there in America. Lowering taxes is the economic equivalent of blood-letting.
I call on Democrat politicians to stop deceiving America and themselves by preaching the problem will be solved by more spending. We are in debt up to our gills and headed for default if we don’t change the trajectory of our debt toward a soft landing somewhere in a definable future.
I call on the Tea Party to stop deceiving America and themselves that suddenly shrinking government and so-called entitlements is a solution to our debt crisis. That is like trying to land a jumbo jet on an aircraft carrier. It won’t augur well; it will auger in. A long runway and a soft landing is the only way to land massive flying machines.
I call on the Wall Street to come up with a new derivative that makes civic responsibility and loyalty to Americans a foremost priority in investment. Instead of measuring success selfishly in terms of dollars earned, why not start playing a game that awards bonuses to those investment bankers who have done the most good for Americans and America in a given year as measured by a panel of foundation presidents who assess those values. Maybe that will be enough incentive to tip Wall Street back in the direction of “doing God’s work” in a real sense rather than a cynical one.
We are facing tough times. Isn’t it time we saw some trickle down “civic responsibility” on the part of corporations and Wall Street bankers to see who can do the most for America rather than pad the purses of the “already-have-alots”?
* Attributed to Joseph P. Kennedy

Class Warfare

Every time a tax increase on the rich is proposed, the Tea Party front men, Boehner and McConnell, holler “Class Warfare” as if any attempt at accomplishing justice and balancing budgets at the same time is somehow wrong. Calling tax increases on the rich class warfare is like calling affirmative action in college or corporate admissions the same. It is all part and parcel of the convenient compartmentalized thinking called privilege.
Privilege is the real class warfare and it is on-going. It is so pervasive it is subtle. We have heard of “too big to fail” when the Big Banks were bailed out. Privilege is too big to see.
Privilege starts with assumptions. It assumes that certain people deserve more than others based on distribution of wealth as it exists. It assumes, for instance, that white people deserve more than black people because white people have a larger share of the economic pie to begin with and always have had. In other words, never mind looking at how that picture came into being and is sustained. Just look at the picture, and assume that it exists by tradition, not privilege. Assume that the educational opportunities for blacks and whites are the same, that job opportunity is the same, and that we make of life what we put into it. Also assume that we do not have to think about these things because we have been taught a so-called self-evident truism that “All men are created equal.” We all theoretically come out of the starting blocks as equals.
Privilege is never to examine these assumptions. Privilege is being able to play along with the status quo and to assume we all get to climb the same ladders to success, or at least that we all have ladders to climb. The pervasive class warfare waged since the founding of this country has been the deliberate as well as privileged exclusion of groups of people from the most lucrative mainstream channels to success.
Taxing the rich is a way of reinvesting in the process that broadens the playing field for those less fortunate. It is not class warfare. Waiting for the rich to invest voluntarily in mechanisms that produce jobs in America is like waiting to win the lottery: the chances of winning are miniscule. There are too many opportunities worldwide to invest in that might yield a better return, especially through investing in the developing world.
What we need in America right now is for rich Americans to see their vast resources as a privilege rather than a right. With privilege comes responsibility. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates both see their wealth as a social responsibility, not as a personal hoard. When Buffett says he needs to be taxed more, he is recognizing his responsibility to his country and his privileged status. He also sees government as a proper vehicle in tough times through which opportunity can be expanded to include more citizens contributing to the greater good. Certainly, in a perfect capitalist world, opportunity would best be provided by private investment. However, investors, like consumers, look to invest in the best available investments regardless of country of origin. When a country is suffering a recession, global or otherwise, it is government that is most likely to invest directly in its own country’s economy through improved infrastructure. It may also invest in what it sees as future sources of domestic economic growth areas, but it can make some bad bets as the Obama administration did in Solyndra, the California solar collector company. Sticking to infrastructure reform is probably the better investment.
So when the Republicans, at the behest of Tea Party extremists, scream “Class Warfare,” just answer with the same answer that confronted the so-called unfairness of affirmative action. Affirmative action as a concept actually describes an affirmation of privilege in that the sons and daughters of privilege get to have their own lower entrance standards to college admission under the label “legacy.” While the less fortunate may also be held to similar standards under the same label of “affirmative action,” they would be better described as candidates for “affirmative correction.”
Taxing the rich is just another form of “affirmative correction.” “Class warfare” is a paltry cry made from privilege, and, in reality, an accurate assessment of a chronic condition.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

I wonder if gated communities around America contain any liberals. The way liberals have been attacked for the past four decades you would think they would be busy building gated communities and even moats to keep the conservatives from spinning their fixed-axle tired beliefs across liberal lawns. But few liberals actually live in suburban gated communities and they generally do not spend their weekends mowing acres of grass as conservatives do in ritualistic homage to their real or imagined ancestors who once mowed fields of hay. Of course I am fantasizing. Most of them hire illegal immigrants to mow their fields of dreams.
Right now the Republican presidential candidates are debating about, among other efforts to fortify or dismantle, who can build the toughest, most impenetrable defense against unwelcome border crossings from Mexico. If conservatives can build a wall to keep law and order, they will. That you can count on. It is one of the ways orthodoxy maintains its purity.
Robert Frost has the narrator of his poem “Mending Wall” raise the question about walls that inevitably must be asked: “Why do they make good neighbors?” The narrator was responding to his neighbor’s saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The neighbor could not explain how the wall made good neighbors; he simply repeated the statement, as if it were self-evident.
Conservatives like what they perceive to be self-evident truths such as “life is not fair” and "that government is best which governs least."* They take the notion of self-evident truth from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence where self-evident truths are proclaimed in America’s famous formal declaration. There, Thomas Jefferson declares that “all men are created equal” except, of course, for those who are not considered in the count such as African-Americans and non-property holders at the time of the Preamble’s writing.
America has always had rebellious sorts represented in its literature. Huck Finn, for instance, when confronted with what are for him the orthodox strictures of the widow Douglas and Miss Watson, complains very early in the novel that all the food provided to him by the pair “was cooked by itself.” Then Huck delivers a cosmic statement that applies to much more than the separation of foods: “In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and things go better.” In that single statement author Mark Twain is suggesting that separation is not the solution. America is, in effect, a barrel of odds and ends and needs to let the natural evolution of things take its course. Separation is artificial, unnatural, and unsavory. Twain is preparing the 19th Century reader for the relationship Huck soon after develops with runaway slave Jim.
21st Century America is gradually “browning” and not because of global warming. Demographers project that by 2042 the majority of the U.S. population will be non-white.** We will be more of a blend of non-white minorities than a majority of whites. Huck would happily adapt to such an America.
Walls, like principles, can provide security. They can keep us anchored to a place in space, time, and thought. They can also bind us or confine us. We can become prisoners of our own creation. We can wall ourselves in as we wall something else out. There is always a loss for every imagined gain.
In fact, the wall along the Mexican border may end up protecting Mexico more than the United States. Mexico’s economy is on the rise; its birthrate is dropping; and there is less need for Mexicans to come to America where jobs are hard to find. By the time we build a sturdier wall along the border, we may no longer need one, but Mexico may.
Some of the most famous walls in history are monuments to ancient times reminding all who encounter them that they, too, are of questionable practical value beyond serving as tourist attractions. The Berlin Wall (what’s left of it), the Great Wall of China, and the many walls left by the Roman Empire scattered across Europe are reminders of how temporal the intentions of man are and how vestigial are his monumental works of stone.
Today the wall that keeps the Palestinians away from the continual expansion of Israeli settlements into their former land serves a short-term solution for Israeli immigrants and exacerbates a long range problem for the region. The Mexico-U.S wall may do the same. We, too, are walling out because we say we want law and order so long as it benefits those who hold power in the United States. At the same time we want freedom from law and order in order to exploit the weak by paying them a wage that brings a lower standard of living. Barriers to keep immigrants out of the country are good; barriers such as unions which protect workers from having to accept a lower standard of living are bad. What is your wall of protection is someone else’s barrier. No wall is neutral.
Frost ends his poem “Mending Wall” resigned to the fact that his neighbor will not question the principle handed down to him by his father even when the fence no longer serves any practical purpose:
I see him there/ Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top/In each hand, like an old stone savage armed,/ He moves in darkness as it seems to me,/ Not of woods only and the shade of trees./ He will not go behind his father’s saying,/ And he likes having thought of it as well/He says again, “ good fences make good neighbors.”
* The latter quotation was first made popular by that counter-culture icon Henry David Thoreau who used it in the opening sentence of his essay “Civil Disobedience.”
**(http://articles.cnn.com/2008-08-13/us/census.minorities_1_hispanic-population-census-bureau-white-population?_s=PM:US).

America: Modern Greece or Ancient Greece?

It turns out, when times are tough, capital gets concentrated and constipated. Moreover, competition is reduced. There are fewer players in any given game. There are more on the sidelines. Banks become conservative rather than cavalier. They lend less and only to sure bets, which means the tried and true, not the innovative and adventuresome. Banks get lean and mean. One needs to look no further than the 30,000 mere mortal employees to be released by Bank of America in the near future to understand the magnitude of the problem.
The elite in Washington, which includes both parties, have offered two scenarios for recovery. The Obama recovery plan includes a carrot-stick approach with tax incentives to stimulate small business and the loss of tax loopholes for the rich. The Republicans have nothing but carrots for the rich and sticks for the downtrodden. Their message to the poor is grab hold of your bootstraps, pull them up, and that gesture will pull you up as well. It’s a neat trick, like smoke and mirrors, and costs nothing. It also does nothing but leave the poor further behind and out of the running for the American Dream.
Government’s role in good times is to act as referee in the game of capitalism. In bad times it needs to act as re-distributor of wealth and initiator of play. Bad times are like end-games in Monopoly. There are no more properties to buy; there are no more hotels to place; the game is in the hands of the winner; the game is over, and it is time to start a new game, a new beginning. The meaning is in the journey to Park Place, not in sitting there at end-game.
Imagine an NFL season where all the top players are concentrated in one team. There would be no season. The sport would die. The results would be so predictable no one would subscribe. It is the uncertainty that makes the NFL vibrant. On any given day, any team might beat anyone else. There are mechanisms in place to assure competition. If we are so committed to competition in that arena, why are we so hesitant to foster it in our economy? Why do we not have strong mechanisms in place to ensure good competition in the marketplace?
The answer is capitalists try to eliminate competition. They do not thrive on it. A famous capitalist named John D. Rockefeller once proclaimed that competition is a sin. It therefore is up to government to make sure that capitalist entities do not destroy competition through monopolization of markets. Anti-trust laws are written to prevent monopolies.
Market winners continually try to fix the game in their favor. They grow so powerful and so large they are deemed economically immortal (too big to fail). They are made into “gods” who have their own games they play way above mere mortals who must struggle below and sift the fallen scraps for paltry rewards, which is what real trickle-down looks like. The “gods” (masters of the universe) have the resources to purchase politicians who work for their benefit both in and out of office. The professional politicians are either agents of preserving one form or another of the status quo while in office or they are lobbyists directly representing the “gods” and their business entities. The whole game takes place in the economic equivalent of very exclusive fraternity houses. No mere mortals need apply, unless you are a genius who can make one of the “gods” some real money.
America, alas, has become like Ancient Greece except the “gods” are real rather than imagined. The “gods” actually do control the lives of the masses and limit their growth by failing to keep the economic game open. Instead, the masses are given unsustainable entitlements and then blamed for not playing the game from which they have been excluded by the very blamers. The “gods” invest less and less in their less fortunate compatriots, export their jobs, and then blame the losers for not taking responsibility for the outcome.
Of course there are many companies that have chosen names from the time of Ancient Greece. There is Elysium Wealth Management, Centaur Pharmaceuticals, Hercules Incorporated, Hermes Financial Group, Amazon, Atlas Van Lines, and Delphi Energy, to name a few. However, the real titans of the business world today have more mundane names such as General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, and Goldman-Saks.
Yes, the masses were told by the minions of the “gods” that they, too, could have a piece of the American Dream if they bought a house with a sub-prime mortgage they could ill afford, but that failure is blamed on the duped buyers under the rubric of caveat emptor. They should have known better. Meanwhile the “gods” made out like bandits.
Now the Tea Party may look like a rebellion orchestrated by a segment of the masses, but it is actually a false rebellion orchestrated by the “gods” to convince the masses that they, the masses, are to blame for their problems. It’s another neat trick the “gods” have played on mere mortals.
The American “gods” warn that America could go the way of modern Greece if drastic austerity measures are not taken when, in fact, America has been acting out a modern day version of ancient Greek mythology: the “gods” always win. Now maybe we mere mortals will awaken to confront the duplicity and hypocrisy of the “gods” and send them all to Hades, otherwise known as Federal Court. But that possibility is remote as long as the “gods” and their political minions keep our attention on that unsustainable national debt which, according to the “gods” is the result of too much indulgence in entitlements for the masses.
As Francis Bacon once said, “Of great riches there is no real use, except in the distribution; the rest is but conceit.”