DUMB WAITER – June 24, 2010

Barely a month into the new coalition, the Tory government has shown its true colors, and the Liberal Democratic leader is being exhibited as bought off for a wooden medal in the form of the title of Deputy Prime Minister. The price for this empty title seems to be a total jettisoning of the entire Liberal Democratic agenda, including the items whose inclusion in the Government’s promises were an integral portion of the ostensible agreement founding the present ruling majority. The Liberal leader says nothing while the Tories rake over the earnings of public servants and working people generally, taking their past earnings in the form of their pensions, and their present and future earnings in the form of cuts in salaries and wages, essential welfare support and public benefits, and the continuation of programs in housing, education, and health, including even the costs of school lunches for indigent children. These are all things that New Labour had predicted and which the Tories had sworn to protect, though in truth the New Labour scammers would have done also, but not as much and not as blatantly, rather like the New Democrats in USA. Housing is understood by its supporters as destined for the lowest level of public support since 1924, university tuition caps are understood to face increases from 3G/year to 5G or 7G, and even 10G is mooted in the press. The children of working people would be largely excluded’ with the places being “sold off” to those who can afford the tariff, with much less emphasis on proven academic ability. And the dumb waiter sits in silence, delivers the votes when those are called for, taking the worthy defeat of Gordon Brown as full payment by the party always representing the interests of the rich and powerful. And short of a denunciation by the Liberal Democratic Party, these will have tolerated their full political castration.

BANKSTERS AGAIN - June 17, 2010

For the past few years, the quiet resentment that thinking US have carried in the direction of the banks, the large corporations, and enormously wealthy robber barons have displayed have all boiled up as the people who used to love to call themselves the “masters of the Universe” carried this nation to the very brink of another Great Depression and quite possibly over it into ruin have wrung all believability out of the pernicious lie that “greed is good”. As long as there appeared to be much prosperity around, it was easy to bury one’s doubts and fears, but we are now at the beginning of the avalanche and we can hear the call to save the people if not the system. Yet some of our political leaders are still dancing to the tune of their corporate owners, and these include at least one Democrat whom so many of us had desperately hoped to see elected as President. They are still at bat to preserve the unjustified tax loopholes for the richest plunderers of the economy, even holding hostage the desperate needs of unemployed US to maintain their form of highway robbery. It is no wonder that those of us who do not worship the gospel of greed and predation have lost essentially all of the unjustified hope we had carried for what was once the party of FDR. And the faint expressions of distaste we get from Obama are no match for the terrible signs on the road ahead. We have no place to look for hope in the next six years, certainly not from the possibility that the false representatives of the “little people” might be replaced four years hence by the minions of the US version of the Tories. There is no hope to be obtained from the possibility of revolution, and equally little from the knowledge that nothing short of it will end the permanent robbing and impoverishment of the People.

OIL - June 10, 2010

It seems like decades that the US populace has been pummeled by nonsense out of the mouth of Grover Norquist. He is amply paid by the corporate Robber Barons to deliver the line that the US citizen can spend his money (which would otherwise go to taxes) better and more wisely than the Government can. As for emergencies, the very rich would be able to afford them out of their tax avoidance. Among the most enthusiastic disciples of this vicious doctrine have been the substantial majorities in the Gulf states. Not all as vociferous as the gun-slinging imitation cowboys of Texas, but the others are not far behind in their attachment to the doctrine of tax-free self reliance. And they have also been devotees of drilling for oil in the oceans, down to about a mile below sea level and contemptuous of those who have argued the tremendous risk. But as some have said, it is easy to be cavalier about the Government until one suddenly needs a Big Favor, like keeping one’s job or business or not being evicted from one’s home. And suddenly, the dark cloud on the horizon turns out to be BP slipping out from underneath their obligation to make good on the costs of their negligence as a rogue oil well on the rampage threatens to wipe out the life’s investment of thousands in those same Gulf states. And suddenly we hear all kinds of unfamiliar voices demanding that Uncle Sam make good in case the corporations they have always trusted as more upstanding than the hated Government squeeze out of the responsibility by quoting laws their lobbies have paid to have enacted. And not even a word of “oops” or contrition for having participated in leading he electorate astray. Suddenly out of the rat-holes come the hirelings of the trusted corporations demanding that the taxpayers of the nation cough up hundreds of billions to secure the security of welfare that the tax avoiders voted against time after time after time.

IDEAS - June 3, 2010

In the early days of the mid-XVIII Century, the US colonies were a hotbed of ideas, with many of these finding their way into the forming nation. In the XIX century, the flow of ideas through the US gave rise to an international reputation for Yankee ingenuity, and that lasted until the mid-XX. But increasingly in the XX Century, the control of industry passed from technical invention to the growth of sales and thence to the manipulation of money. The few people who approached difficulties in the economy or technology as problems to be solved like crosswords were swamped by Robber Barons who were responsive only to sure things in the market. Someone with an invention, even a simple one that was a sure thing, had a difficult time with the control of the economy, whether by public or private by deciders who were largely un-arithmetic or unschooled in even elementary science, and who paid attention only to thoughts promoted by lobbyists or other channels of power, excluding those for which there were no rewards for the middle-men or their paymasters. Even inventions that had been tried elsewhere and whose benefits had been recorded in journals like Distributed Energy were routinely consigned to the circular file by office-holders and executives that simply did not have the training to measure their worth, and had no close subordinates that could evaluate them. The management of money was all those officers could think of. No less an established genius like Thomas Edison could not get a hearing from the supposed risk-takers of Wall Street when he wanted them to support electric lighting for that area until he got the ear of J. P. Morgan, who proceeded to create the Edison General Electric Company and then used his wiles to squeeze Edison out of it. And that was Edison. More modest inventors, like me, have it much harder to reach the ears of power brokers that could improve their corners of the world, but don’t.

PRESIDENTS - May 27, 2010

It is genuinely sickening to see the US President parading in the role of Emperor of the World, especially when any decently informed person knows that the leadership of the Cold War alliance has made him the apologist in chief for some of the most unattractive tyrannies on the planet. The case that should bring this issue up today is the reception of Obama for the appointment of Filipe Calderon by the Fox government in 2006 in the face of universal reports by the international press of the overwhelming exit polls indicating the victory of Lopez Obrador then. Of course, that election was held in the regime of Cheney, untrusted by hardly anyone on the world stage. To see Obama embracing him and honoring him is like a page out of history when corrupt popes pronounced blessings on corrupt monarchs. I don’t know whether it is worse that Obama knows better and lies about it or that he is blind to a fact evident to the world during his brief tour of legislative power. It is almost as bad as Reagan’s embrace of Ferdinand Marcos and his conferring upon him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And Calderon has lived down to the dirty events of his installation, presiding over the criminal civil wars taking place in Mexico today. All this, and the pontificating over the election in Iran, where no evidence beyond suspicion indicated the true result of the recent election. In addition, the deciding of which nation must speak the truth about its atomic bombs and which is above that level of decency, and who must be believed when he professes civilian motivation for atomic power. So while US commands respect for its supposed fiscal power, the deep honor that went with our early embrace of the Enlightenment has been eroded by the Cheney regime and the embrace of their filthy hands by Obama leaves us in the position of honoring one of the most worthless corrupt governments while our president poses for holy pictures.

MIRANDA - Thursday, May 20, 2010

Last weekend, I was watching the US A G being grilled on NBC regarding the giving of “Miranda rights” to people he described as terrorists. He told us that he knew they were guilty, and assured the world that his department would do whatever they needed to assure that these guilty men would not be set free even if they were somehow acquitted by a jury of Americans acting under civilian or military law, whichever was necessary to get the job done, with or without evidence under the standards of military or civilian due process. He assured us that the application of Miranda would not stand in the way of executing or imprisoning them, lifelong if necessary, since apparently he was convinced that they were all guilty, with or without usable evidence. Since he had not seen their alleged crimes, we must understand that he was relying on a chain of evidence linking them to the criminal deed, probably a chain of hearsay without any documentation. The talking point reads like this: We all know the accused is guilty, sworn for by the Dept of
Justice (meaning the result of a star chamber-like trial) so why give them the benefit of Miranda? There is no sense in this that the US has a vested interest in being sure of the due process if it results in a conviction and punishment. I always thought that was the point of due process, the fear of unjust conviction being traditionally thought more onerous than that for an unjust acquittal. But since the press has told us that they are all guilty, we need no more cause to deny them the protections of US justice, according to the AG. And they may well be treated as though their guilt were proven by the standards of our Law, since the secret process carried out in the offices of the AG, outside the range of Due Process protections, has condemned them to any level of Justice that they may have been accorded originally by the Cheney regime.

IMMIGRANTS - May 6, 2010

The argument over immigrants is another of those battles of extremes. They stand guard over the positions that attract the most opposition with the threat of condemnation for anything that does not separate the sheep from the goats. In the Right corner the drumbeat is essentially for the application of draconian law, to the extent of cruelty, in fortified borders, military patrols, arrests of illegal entrants with imprisonment and deportation even when that entails breakup of families. On the Left, no one claims that everyone in the world has the natural right to permanent residence in US, barring only criminality and human rights offenses. In fact, there is a much less cruel law now in effect that would ease the attraction to US of people from countries of middling prosperity in which the People stand for predatory government. A simple action that would put more of the onus where it belongs is a strict program of fines for companies (like some meatpackers) that seem often to hire people with questionable social security numbers. It would be reasonable to require the employers to obtain from holders of such numbers data on the date and place of birth, the parents’ names, the names and locations of the schools attended and a full schedule of alternate names and their spellings. Also the employers should be required to vouch for the use of English by workers who claim to be born and raised in US. Fines for employers that are habitual offenders should be stiff and escalating. Demanding such questions in the allegations by those with a genuinely unlikely story would be merely a way of maintaining the Social Security system. The dogged refusal of government after government to press the issue of who is using a bogus SS number is not racism, does not entail arrest or deportation, but would stem the flow of people fleeing the depredations of their ruling economic elites, into the arms of ours.