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Canary Nation
In times past, before technological wonders replaced them, canaries were kept deep down in the earth to warn miners of poison gas and other disasters. Even as profit-greedy mine owners ignored safety regulations and exploited employees to the breaking point, a humble little song bird was the link between life and death-- between the malfeasance of corporate prosperity, the brutal truth of nature’s reality, and capitalism's inevitable devouring appetite. Those who labor and suffer beneath the sweet song of danger these days seem to have forgotten the ghosts of a century ago, when labor raised our democratic boat on a tide of the American Dream.
Applying that simple analogy to the American empire, it is apparent that the economy is our mine shaft:“Maybe now is when the real dark period begins. Sure the last seven years of the inept Bush regime have been miserable and shameful, sure we've been humiliated, mortified a thousand ways from Sunday by an administration that would yank the legs off a dog if it meant a thank-you note from Dubai.”
“But now Bush is in his final year. This is both the good news, and also the very, very bad news. Because we are now in the death throes of the worst administration in modern history, entering the period of serious consequences, of economic collapse, environmental impact, record oil prices, international recoil, rashes, boils, inexplicable vomiting. Fun for the whole family. “
“Know this for a fact. Bush does not care. He is detached, supercilious, viciously ignorant of anything but how beautifully he has served his corporate masters, of how he has raked in billions of dollars for Halliburton and Lockheed Martin and Exxon and the coal industry, mercenary armies and military manufacturers and his dad's Saudi friends. He is on no one's side but theirs, and he always has been.”
The collapse of the American economy engineered by Bush Co., Wall Street, and the Federal Reserve is a disaster that may finish off millions of the marginal once and for all. It will be a social engineering feat worthy of the most Machiavellian fantasy-come-true. Is there hope? A plan? Some great leadership to emerge and save us? Well, NO!:
"Ha. You should be so lucky. Because your tax money is right now also funding the Fed's unprecedented and rather shocking multibillion-dollar bailout of rich bankers and fund managers who have, through their greed and excess and with the implied blessing of former Chairman Alan Greenspan (whom many consider the architect of the collapse in the first place), helped bring about what is shaping up to be the worst fiscal crisis since World War II.”
One of the most toxic delusions of the American Spectacle is that somehow, most Americans are ‘middle class’; that is to say have houses, drive cars, work steadily, take vacations, get college educations, bond heterosexually in holy wedlock (or some simulacra of same), worship some magical bad-tempered old man in an invisible heaven that loves us, breed, divorce, breed and divorce, and finally transfer unlimited prosperity to the next generation. Movies, YouTube, My Space, and Glenn Beck say so, so it must be real, if not true.
And speaking of 'So' Vice President Prick Cheney, representative of the ruling elite, will just condescendingly dismiss the other two hundred million of us in dire straights, or dire GLTBs for that matter. Except for those million or so suckered into funky mortgages and picking through personal belongings on the foreclosed front lawn, most Americans still feel it won’t happen to them until a bag of groceries from Wal-Mart costs what three bags use to last year. All the slanted stats in the fantasies of Wall Street don’t mean squat when bread costs 100% more than it what it did six months ago at the cheap store. Fallenmonk has a good post on the subject: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 “Global Food Crisis Gets Worse”
Considering what is unraveling, even the most devoted schadenfreude affectionatos (Bush Republicans excepted) will not delight in the turmoil and civil unrest that's coming down the line. Whoever inherits the country come next November, will manage the desperation of a pro-depression, a migratory energy bowl, and the historic debt level of ill-gotten profiteering. Children in the loss, and their children, will bear the punishment of our poison dreams, inaction, and squandering stupidity. One day in story telling, they may ask by expensive candle light “why didn’t you stop them?” We will read them the “Lord of the Rings” and speak in ages. The process may take years, but it is already happening. The housing crisis is but a symptom.
This summer it may cost many cheapened dollars a gallon to have illegals mow the perfect front lawn, gas that ’special’ outdoor kitchen, and fill the pool with swimable water. And the ‘cleaning’ ‘assistants’ will be hard pressed to trek to obliviousburbia past the McForeclosures, because gas will out-cost minimum wage or the tag-sale of castoff stuff out of fashion by a month. When the poor get poorer, violence and destruction soon appear, as do suspension of liberties and the proliferation of ‘private’ ‘security militias to protect the have’s from the have none‘s and ‘want some’s'.’ The want mores will ‘deva-live' on estates behind militarized gates. Security snipers will pay the pipers for trespassing, and committing that most grievous and traitorous crime of uprising----property damage.
New Orleans is an eagle sized canary when it comes to predicting what the coming collapse will look like. It won’t be soon. It will take time for the Federal Reserve to pay off Wall Street and bank fraudsters with borrowed tax money before the real ordeal begins. As for incentives, don’t count on it. The recent Bush proposal to give the middle class who qualify a few hundred dollars to spend at the mall, is ludicrous and aimed solely at getting John McCain elected in November. (Read excellent analysis on Post Modern America)
And that, my friends is the point. In only a decade or less, the Chicago schools of neo-liberal Milton Freedman and the neo-conservative Machiavellian theories of Leo Straus, have created an entropic decline of the world’s greatest democracy in what Naomi Klein has called the profitization of crises and the rewards of shock.
For profiteers, it is a ‘win-win’ situation. Chaos is more profitable than not. Iraq is a perfect example on a monstrous scale of looting, slaughter, and corrupt profiteering. Iraq was never about Sadam Hussein, democracy, or freedom: it was about booty. Although oil profits are less than expected, Viceroy Paul Bremer made sure all the old laws and contracts were rewritten to benefit corporate America, and install a puppet government established to insure those profitable supply lines.
New Orleans is a case at home. Years after the Katrina Hurricane, this historic American city is still a ruin, while investors and carpet baggers pick over its bones to revitalize it as a tourist Disneyland of upscale condos, gated communities, golf courses, and casinos. This is successful capitalism and failed government at its predatory best, or from the Republican/Democrat point-of-view, free market economy at its privileged optimum.
The iceberg of profiteering that will sink Titanic America has been in the making since well before senile Ronald Reagan invented ‘tinkle down’ economics. It is now the established as the ‘New World Order,’ and even uppity powers like the old USA are fodder for globalized corporate neo-colonialism. It is not our intention here to discuss the intricate merits of its success or failure , but we must address its affects on the personal lives of ordinary Americans, middle class or not. American poverty is the elephant in the room, invisible to all but those who know it. “The Audacity of Depression”
The neo-con concept that greater wealth can be obtained from exploiting disaster than building wealth from mere production and commerce is central also to the Ponzi schemes of Wall Street’s ‘creative’ financing. These incredibly complicated pyramid instruments vastly enriched players, while claiming to distribute risk in such a wide base as to make it a non-factor. These ‘innovative‘ paradigms that proclaim debt to be asset, and which produce wealth by interest derivatives, leverage ad infinitum, and lucrative fees are criminal fraud. In such a system, CEO’s of collapsed companies get paid a king’s ransom for failure. Is it any wonder that George Bush is the avatar of such a system? The ‘finitum’ part is 'Happening Now‘, as CNN’s Wolf Blitzer might opine.
To understand the import of the unfolding disaster, consider that of the 300 million US citizens, roughly 25 million are baby boomers heading for retirement in the next few years. While it is true that 20% of that number are prosperous and secure in retirement, millions are barely making due, tens of thousands have watched annuities and retirement investments wiped out by bankrupt companies, to which they devoted a lifetime of professional service. Millions are living on leveraged credit, and millions more are just surviving on social security. Tens of millions are the working poor often working multiple jobs and still failing. It’s a particularly volatile condition for systematic civil failure. A staggering 87 million of Americans live at, or below, the poverty line. Most of those are children without health insurance. Thank you President Bush for your recent veto, given with as much conservative compassion as was possible.
One of the most clarion voices, plain speaking to the reality of the failing economy, to provide as it once did, the American Dream of upward mobility, is Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickeled & Dimed in America.”“Written as an exposé, Ehrenreich attempts to combat the "too lazy to work" and "a job will defeat poverty" ideals held by traditionalists. Suggesting problems with the argument, Ehrenreich highlights many of the difficulties people have working jobs that pay low wages.
“Foremost, she attacks the notion that low-wage jobs require "unskilled" labor. The author, a Ph.D. educated journalist, found manual labor taxing, uninteresting and degrading. She described how the work required incredible feats of stamina, focus, memory, quick thinking, and fast learning. Constant and repeated movement creates a risk of repetitive stress injury, pain must often be worked through to hold a job in a market with constant turnover; and the days are filled with degrading and uninteresting tasks (e.g. toilet-cleaning and shirt-reordering).
She argues "personality" tests, questionnaires designed to weed out "incompatible" potential employees, and urine drug tests, increasingly common in the low wage market, deter potential applicants and violate liberties while managerial apathy and austereness contribute to class separation and promote an unhealthy, stressful work environment.
She reports that "help needed" signs don't necessarily indicate an opening; more often their purpose is to sustain a pool of applicants to safeguard against rapid turnover of employees. She also argues one low wage job is often not enough to support one person (let alone a family); without inflating housing prices and stagnant wages, this practice increasingly becomes difficult to maintain. Many of the workers encountered in the book survive by living with relatives or other persons in the same position, or in their cars in parking lots.
She concludes by refuting the claim that low-wage workers, recipients of government or charitable services like welfare, food, and healthcare, are simply living off the generosity of others. Instead, she suggests, "we" live off their generosity:
When someone works for less pay than she can live on ... she has made a great sacrifice for you ... The "working poor" ... are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone.”
And that was at the beginning of the Bush Administration.
Poverty, and its attendant complexes of crime, drugs, suffering, death, are the rot at the foundation of the American Spectacle. Only one of the national presidential candidates spoke to the catastrophe that rising poverty will visit on America; and that was John Edwards, who was roundly ridiculed for it. Neo-con's basically agree with talk-moron Glenn Beck, who has stated that “The poor should not be made happy, because pain will motivate them to improve their lives.” Something like that was said shortly before the citizens of Paris destroyed the Bastille, stone by bloody stone.
Aside from John Edwards, there has been no serious conversion at any level about poverty and its consequences since the 1960’s, and the warning analysis of the Kerner Commission “Race Poverty and the Inner City” , March 28, 2008 . So mesmerized by the media spectacle of the good life in America, it is entirely possible that most American's are either in extraordinary denial about what’s happening, falsely sheltered in the cocoon of basic comfort, or simply and tragically unaware of the tsunami of want that is about to wash over this country.
What does poverty look like in America? In the silent language of survival, it is the glassy-eyed wraith of ancient days. It is that nice couple down the street who both work, hope to put teenagers in college, and are frightened to death about that third mortgage. It is that old couple next door living on meager retirement funds shut up in one warm room in the winter with lights-off after eight. It is that angry little kid in elementary school acting out the collapse at home.
It is those working people, outsourced, unemployed, and defrauded of bankrupt pension funds. It is hundreds of square miles of urban blight even more terrible than when last visited in the 1960’s. It is millions of uninsured Americans suffering from lingering illness. It is millions of hungry children, with single mothers working two jobs and still failing to meet minimum standards of well being. It is staggeringly high ratios of for-profit criminal incarceration, drugs, gratuitous murder, gangs, generational welfare, child mothers, and New Orleans.
It is two nice old guys living in the beautiful, dilapidated eden of an old farm house, struggling with the reality that two social security incomes is not enough to survive another Vermont winter. It is the squeezing fist of greed, indifference, and intent, that drains the life out of what once the world’s greatest democracy and hope.
We are among the nomadic ’used’ people America cannot see, hear, help, or employ. We are seniors sharing a berth with millions of our fellow citizens on corporate Noah’s Ark of Disaster. We write graffiti on the walls of empire in an act of revolt for all those who are unable to tell their stories of failure in the land of the free and home of the brave; land of opportunity, and the ‘American Dream.’ We are the little birds dreaming of flight, and singing of danger:
----We are left to play out the game day by day. That being the case, we should elect to play it out with the best among us, the ones on humanity's side, that hidden and unheralded aristocracy -- those quiet lamp lighters making their way through the deepening dusk of American civilization.E. M. Forster described them as,
"Not an aristocracy of power, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes and through the ages, and they know each other when they meet. ... Authority, seeing their value, tries to net them and to utilize them. ... But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut they are no longer in the room; Their temple is the Holiness of the Heart's Imagination, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide open world."
(long opening pause)
Annie Lennox 'Little Bird'