The State of the Union, That’s Not Optimistic

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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2016 SOTU, Accomplishments, American Dream, American ideals, Congress, Denial, Fables, Faith, Falsehoods, Great Men In History, Oligarchy, Optimism, Plutocracy, Pollyanna, President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, Supreme Court, Vision

President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union speech, The US Capitol, January 12, 2016. (Evan Vucci, Pool/AP, via http://abcnews.com).

President Barack Obama ended his eighth and final State of the Union address in front of Congress and the nation last night with the words, “That’s why I stand here as confident as I have ever been that the state of the union is strong.” The president’s crescendo came after nearly fifteen minutes of describing the America that he sees and believes in. Obama illuminated individual examples of dedication and hard work and courage he has witnessed since he first began running for president in February 2007.

That President Obama chooses to look at his hundreds of — if not several thousand — examples of individual Americans striving for and maybe even achieving some sort of American Dream is admirable. But in light of the remaining 320 million Americans unaccounted for in his speech, the president’s speech isn’t an expression of optimism. President Obama has chosen the path of too many in power, to ignore how deep the wounds and injuries of the nation go, to fight what the US faces in terms of its cavernous and even cancerous problems with beliefs and limited actions. That’s not optimism. That’s both faith — albeit a bit misplaced — and blind devotion to an ideal that this America in 2016 has been moving away from for decades.

There are just a few examples from President Obama’s speech that point to a combination of near-religious faith and ostrich head-in-sand denial. Most notably:

The idea that the US economy has produced a net +14 million jobs since the day President Obama took office. That number is probably correct, but just like with all previous presidents since FDR, this number is hardly the whole story. Fact is, millions of Americans who lost their jobs during the Great Recession have yet to regain employment. Millions more have taken the jobs that the American economy creates the most frequently: low-wage, part-time, seasonal and/or contract work. And for those Americans who have been able to hold on to employment despite the Great Recession, their real wages are just in the last two years beginning to approach 2008 numbers. More importantly, their ability to move to a better or higher paying position has diminished since 2008, which is part of a four-decade-long trend. Yes, Americans should credit the Obama Administration for stanching the bleed from the femoral artery in 2009, 2010, and 2011. But the American economy still needs an arterial graft and a heart transplant.

2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump meeting with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Gillette Stadium, Foxboro, MA, October 21, 2012. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald;http://bostonhearld.com).

President Obama’s claim that Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim, anti-Black, and anti-feminist populism is just “wrong” and “doesn’t represent our American values.” Trump’s campaign certainly doesn’t represent American ideals or visions of a “shining city upon a hill,” to quote the late former President Ronald Reagan from his 1984 campaign. But despite what Obama said last night, Trump and his supporters and potential voters are a strain of American values and politics that has always been, and perhaps always will be. Trump is very much exploiting a clear-eyed vision of America as a White (and male) Christian nation, one with automatic exclusions from the club of those not entitled to the American Dream socioeconomically, culturally, and even spiritually. While President Obama acknowledged this in his speech, he ignored the reality that this strain of -isms in American politics and culture remains powerful and needs to be fought, not just wished away with a more conciliatory vision of America.

The idea that a better statesman, that an all-time great president like FDR or Abraham Lincoln could have bridged the divide in Congress, with the Supreme Court, and in American politics in general. This is patently false and extremely tongue-in-cheek on President Obama’s part. His great-man-in-politics theme has actually grown tired over the course of the past nine years. For as great as both of those presidents were, President Franklin Roosevelt and President Lincoln presided over an America in def-con-one crises, before America was officially a superpower. As terrible as the Great Recession and its after-effects have been, as deplorable as American use of force in the Middle East, East Africa, and South Asia has been, the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II were foundational periods of change. President Obama might not have been the GPAT (Greatest President of All-Time), but in an era of an oligarchic Congress and a plutocratic Supreme Court, he did as good as job as FDR and President Lincoln would have. It still wasn’t good enough, but not because President Obama wasn’t a great person or very good president. Americans needed someone willing to make radical changes, and not just a centrist committed to a grand vision of bipartisan compromise and slow, incremental changes.

I will definitely miss President Obama as my president when he relinquishes the office on Friday, January 20, 2017 at 12 noon. But I won’t miss his brand of optimism. For optimism that relies on falsehoods about America as a meritocracy, Americans as a tolerant people, and American imperialism as a force for good in the world isn’t optimism. It’s a fable more vast and more deadly than any the Grimm brothers could have written two hundred years ago.

Corporations, Dogs, and a Possible Civil Rights Future

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Bill Gates, Citizens United (2010), Citizenship Rights, Civil Rights, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Constitutional Amendment, Corporations, David Koch, Dogs, Hobby Lobby decision (2014), Ingrid Newkirk, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito, Kamala Harris, Koch Brothers, Malala Yousafzai, Mark Cuban, Melissa Harris-Perry, Michael Bloomberg, Money and Politics, NBC Universal Comcast, Oligarchy, Paul Ryan, Personhood, PETA, Plutocracy, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Supreme Court, Supreme Court decisions, Walton Family

Matt Wuerker, Corporate Money/Vote Here, January 2010. (Politico.com). Qualifies as fair use — low resolution, related to subject matter of this blog post.

It finally happened. After twenty-two attempts between the 117th and the 118th Congress, and a short ratification process, the US Constitution finally has a Twenty-Eight Amendment. For the first time, more than two million corporations with headquarters within America’s borders have citizenship rights, including the right to vote. Despite widespread opposition from Democrats and independent progressives, thirty-eight states ratified the amendment in record time, 72 days. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment — the one lowering the national voting age from 21 to 18 — had held the previous record of 100 days, as three-fourths of the states had ratified it in 1971.

President Michael Bloomberg signed the bill this morning in a well-attended Rose Garden ceremony. With such luminaries as Mark Cuban, Bill Gates and David Koch present, the President said, “This is a great victory of American democracy, ensuring its preservation for future generations.” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), also present at the ceremony, said, “The American people finally have a democracy that represents us all, one that will stabilize our government and our economic way of life.”

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Hall, January 27, 2005. (http://themoderatevoice.com).

What President Bloomberg and Speaker Ryan didn’t say was that this was the most expensive constitutional amendment campaign in the nation’s history. The Walton family, the Koch Brothers and NBC Universal Comcast-Time-Warner alone spent almost $1 billion in saturating the Internet and airwaves with ads in support of the amendment between mid April and the end of June, according to the Toronto Star. Independent watchdog groups, including the United Nations Department of Political Affairs, put the total amount at $2.2 billion, with much of the money going directly to state legislatures and much-needed infrastructural projects.

“When governments can only operate at the behest of corporations, you no longer have a democracy, you have a plutocracy,” UN spokesperson Malala Yousafzai said at a press conference in New York this afternoon. “Only twenty percent of the US electorate participated in the ratification process,” Yousafzai said, corresponding roughly to the demographics of America’s rich and middle classes.

That this came on the same day as the 60th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not lost on America’s public intelligentsia. “This is a shame that the America republic will have to live with for years to come — if there’s an American republic in the future,” Melissa Harris-Perry said in an interview on CBC Radio in Toronto.

This expansion of American democracy comes on the heels of a landmark US Supreme Court decision. Last week, in a 5-4 ruling, the majority decided PETA v. US in favor of the plaintiff, saying that for the first time, “dogs have a constitutional standing on par with persons.” Justice Samuel Alito wrote the court’s majority opinion, and Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion. What made the PETA decision truly historic was that Justice Thomas explained the court’s decision. “We have found, with the help of significant scientific evidence, that dogs are sentient beings, and thus, deserving of the same civil rights that we have all enjoyed in this country for decades. Although dogs today have not been granted the power of the ballot box, they, like my generation of black men and women, have come a long way in their fight for civil rights,” Justice Thomas said.

Co-founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Ingrid Newkirk, and David Shankbone’s dog Little Man, New York City, November 1, 2007. (David Shankbone via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC BY-SA 3.0, GFDL.

The PETA decision overturned a lower court ruling, throwing out the case on the grounds that dogs aren’t human beings. PETA fought the lower court’s ruling based on the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) decision, where the Supreme Court had ruled that a corporate, non-living entity had personhood status because it represented people’s interests and values. This earlier ruling provided an opportunity for PETA to bring in scientific evidence that could elevate the status of dogs as a living entity representing people’s interests and values.

“Dogs everywhere will celebrate this victory, along with their caregivers,” Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president of PETA said last week from her home outside Norfolk, Virginia. “It is our hope that these personhood rights will protect dogs from abuse and neglect for now and for the future, giving them the same rights as a living human being,” Newkirk added. It helped that the Leona Helmsley Charitable Trust covered the estimated $20 million in legal fees and scientific studies for the PETA claim.

Former US Solicitor General Kamala Harris, who had presented the government’s case to the Supreme Court last December, said after last week’s decision, “with this court making a dog a person, this court has made a mockery of American jurisprudence for all time. What about the rights of racial minorities to a fair trial, of women to reproductive choice, of ordinary Americans to a living wage?” Harris resigned on Friday, June 28, just hours after the PETA ruling. President Bloomberg declined comment on Harris’ resignation.

Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson expressed the feelings of many Americans in opposition when he said, “The Star-Spangled Banner should be rewritten. It should be, ‘O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, with corporations’ roaming free, and dogs over descendants of slaves!'”

Oligarchy: The Future Is Now

28 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, race, Religion, Work

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Affordable Care Act, Citizens United, Corporate Interests, Corruption, Divide & Conquer, Economic Inequality, Fascism, Neocons, Neoconservatives, Obamacare, Oligarchy, Plutocracy, President Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton, President Obama, Seeds of Discontent, Supreme Court

“History Repeats Itself: The Robber Barons of the Middle Ages and the Robber Barons of Today”, Puck, Samuel Ehrhardt (1889), June 28, 2012. (http://http://www.library.gsu.edu). In public domain.

Though many of us have been fighting this long war against neocon, reactionary, even fascist elements in American society over the course of the past four decades, it appears that, like the Fire Nation in the Avatar: The Last Airbender series (2004-08), that we’ve lost the war. I’m not predicting that Romney will beat Obama in November. But this election will be closer than it ought to be, thanks mostly to the SuperPAC maelstrom stirred up by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010) and our own get-rich-quick apathy with politics and responsibility in this country.

More importantly, though, is the reality that this election, even with an Obama win, is merely a chink in the armor that is our American oligarchy, now firmly established. With so much in regulations, social welfare, education, unionization, and other protections for the ordinary American rolled back, it’ll take at least a generation to undo the damage done since the Nixon years to our society, economy and environment. With so much wrong, though, it may well be too late to make course corrections without significant consequences for our nation and for the world.

That only in the past couple of years folks who weren’t staunch progressive or true leftist liberals have come to realize that the neocon endgame was a powerful plutocracy is testimony to the long, successful war of identity politics, wedge issues and other distractions that they have fought since ’68. The funny thing is, though, that for most of American history, our government has been a representative democratic oligarchy, especially for the poor or those whom are of color. How can you explain the history of slavery, even the half-century it took for non-landowning White males to get the right to vote?

“The ‘Brains'” Boss Tweed, by Thomas Nast (1871), June 28, 2012. (Vizu via Wikipedia). In public domain.

There have only been brief periods in American history in which the federal government has been responsive to the ordinary American citizen, a protector of the rights of the many and the minority over the rights of rich individuals and powerful economic interests. One of them came as a result of the Great Depression, the start of a nearly forty-year run where our government, despite its flaws and lies, frequently erred on the side of ordinary citizens. People can talk about the Clinton years being an oasis in the middle of a neocon desert, but between the vast expansion of credit, the tearing down of Glass-Steagall, NAFTA and other corporation-friendly policies, we now know that much of what occurred in the ’90s was a mirage.

What is different now — but not so different from the turn of the twentieth century — is the brazenness with which the rich and powerful flaunt their control over our lives. It’s as if they’ve drugged us, tied us down, and occasionally even tortured us, expecting no response or retaliation. And the media has played its role in this, too. From Kim Kardashian to the Real Housewives of RichLandUSA, and from American Idol to Mad Men to Dancing With The Stars. The rest of us just live vicariously through the oligarchy, or become raging and jealous while laughing at the folly of the rich in the process.

Even the wars we fight and the Supreme Court decisions made are steeped in oligarchy and the privileges of the rich and the corporate. That’s why we spent a decade in Iraq, billions on a military fighter we don’t need (F-22), and think that decisions that treat corporations as people and lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans are good for the country.

That’s why today’s Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act of 2010 — otherwise known as Obamacare — matters little in the larger scheme. Of course it matters that millions of Americans have access to healthcare. But even before the Supreme Court decision, the best most un- and under-insured Americans could hope for is a system in which they pay less for crappy health insurance. And health insurance isn’t same as healthcare, folks. Either way, the real winners long-term are private health insurance providers, and not ordinary Americans or the Obama Administration.

It is an unfortunate reality that over the past forty-five years, every aspect of government in this country has been infused with oligarchy. It takes tremendous and unyielding pressure for even a city government like New York (e.g., Rockefeller Laws, stop-and-frisk policy, decriminalization of marijuana) to bend to the demands of its own citizenry. Even then, protests, sit-in and petitions don’t always work (see Occupy Wall Street and the fifteen million protestors before the Second Gulf War as examples).

Mitt Romney Bain Capital “money shot,” October 13, 2011. (http://theatlantic.com via Boston Globe).

So, what to do? I haven’t given up hope, but I can’t spend the days I have left — whether it be moments or decades — waiting for the worm to turn. Next best thing is to hope that my son will drink of my wisdom and learn to fight against this kind of ruling class when he is old enough to do so.

How Our Politicians See Us

18 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work

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American People, Antichrist, Apocalypse, Batteries, Carnegie Mellon University, Mitt Romney, Oligarchy, Politicians, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Slaughterhouse, The Matrix, University of Pittsburgh

Uruguay slaughterhouse with hanging cow carcasses, April 2, 2012. (http://www.meattradenewsdaily.co.uk).

A slightly left-of-center friend of mine from my grad school days at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon has gone off the rails in the past couple of years. At least once a week, he posts on Facebook and The Washington Post his views of the “nice guy…to have at a barbecue,” the “dangerous man” he consistently describes President Barack Obama to be.

Every parsed word, every decision, every breath President Obama takes my friend construes as evidence of the president’s link to the Antichrist and the Apocalypse. My friend has become an unlikely crackpot, willing to see everything President Obama does in the most negative light. To the point where he doesn’t give the president credit for decisions in which few could find fault.

But there’s one thing in which my friend from the ’90s is certain and correct. That if we the people only hold the conservative, reactionary and fascist oligarchs — the GOP and their neocon supporters — accountable, the centrist, not-so-progressive and Wall-Street-beholden oligarchs — the Democratic Party — will be able to get away with demolishing what remains of a sense of progression and fairness in American culture and politics. The two-party system has been broken for a while, rusted out from citizen apathy, a military-industrial complex, and the corruption of money, power and religious absolutism mixed with our nation’s other -isms.

It does beg the question, how do our politicians see us? I already discussed this in my post from last August, “When Politicians Say, ‘The American People…'” But I think moving pictures and good old-fashioned pixels might tell us more about the likes of Mitt Romney and the Koch brothers think of us on a collective scale, courtesy of The Matrix and the meatpacking industry.

Ultimately, we are packets of employment and consumerism, meant to be exploited to the fullest extent that capitalism and our politicians will allow. And if we don’t hold those who may well have our best interests at heart accountable, like President Obama, they too could easily fall prey to those who only see us as carcasses, cash cows or batteries to power their oligarchic lives. Even if my grad school days’ friend is a crackpot.

Born In The U.S.A.

08 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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"Born In The U.S.A.", American Politics, Bruce Springsteen, Economic Inequality, Oligarchy, Poverty, Power of Music, Racism, Social Change, Social Justice

What does it say about a nation or society when a quarter century can go by and the same issues that were front and center then are ones that vex us now? What does it say about us when our standard operating procedure is to avert our eyes to problems that we know must be fixed yesterday? How should we see ourselves if the arguments of our grandparents and parents become our own, especially as we tidy them up for our children and our eventual grandchildren?

If I were Bruce Springsteen (and the E Street Band, for that matter), I might be a bit pessimistic right now. It’s been twenty five years since his groundbreaking single and album made him a household — and not just a New York tri-state area — name. All of his work prior to the summer and fall of ’84 contained threads of social commentary on America’s malaise. But Born In the U.S.A. and “Born In The U.S.A.” raised his level of folksy commentary to a new level, at least for those of us who weren’t listening to Nebraska or who hadn’t heard of the band or Springsteen before.

It was such a simple song. And yet it expressed all of the disappointment, disillusionment and disgust of a generation of folks who grew up seeing America one way. Only to find out that the promise of America the Beautiful and free that they were fed growing up was really somewhere between porridge and gruel. “Born down in a dead man’s town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground” is such a bitter, yet appropriate way to start a song about a Vietnam veteran whose life never worked out the way it was supposed to. Work hard, do the patriotic thing, and expect to have a job and a comfortable life, if not a happy and prosperous one was the expectation of most Americans. Not poverty, debt, welfare, homelessness, drug addiction, undereducation, unemployment and incarceration.

I became a closet Bruce Springsteen fan because of “Born In The U.S.A.” With my mother out of work and on welfare, my father in the middle of his third decade of alcohol abuse, a stepfather with the familial skills of Charles Manson, I could relate to all of the rage and confusion in the song. It was a refreshing change from the coke-induced pop, R&B and rap of the period. The mid-80s were so weird. Between Springsteen and the E Street Band, John Mellencamp and U2, you had Thompson Twins, Doug E. Fresh, Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” New Edition’s “Mr. Telephone Man,” Prince’s “Purple Rain” and “I Would Die 4 U,” and battles over who was the real Roxanne. At least some artists were awake and aware enough to write something for those of us whose lives weren’t exactly a Benetton commercial.

Here we are, a quarter-century later, and nothing really has changed. The highly educated have at least something to fall back on, while those of us with a high school diploma or less face a permanently uncertain future. The rich, while not getting as rich as they were just two years ago, remain far richer than those of us working hard but not getting anywhere. We are still fighting wars with little long-term purpose and without sufficient benefits to those who are fighting on our government’s behalf. Our government continues to drag its feet on anything that would benefit anyone with an income under $200,000 a year.

It’s no wonder that somewhere between two and three million Americans are in jail or prison, that three out of ten of us never graduate from high school, and that the richest one percent of Americans have a net worth greater than the bottom 80 percent of us. It’s such a shame that it could render all of us helpless. I, for one, may need to consider refugee status in a nation with even a modicum of universal health care and moderately less hypocrisy in its government.

But Bruce Springsteen hasn’t given up, at least in his music. His work continues to speak truth to power, to say things that most in the music world don’t have the courage or the innate wisdom to say. It’s unfortunate that what sells today is the bling of booty and booty, and not the thought-provoking lyrics and feelings of folks like Springsteen, of artists like Chuck D and Tupac, of those who dare to use music as a weapon of social change (although Pink, John Mayer and James Blunt are occasional exceptions).

With the end of a disappointing first decade of the twenty-first century looming though, maybe we can still hold out hope for a more permanent nexus between our wild world of pop culture and our need for a stimulated social consciousness. That kind of hope is what keeps me going.