Countrycabelleros,
Another week, another diatribe. Even I think that it is time to leave Joe Kennedy in peace and shift gears. A few reflections:
The debate rages as to whether we should intervene directly in Syria. At least supply the rebels with air cover, weaponry, perhaps a no-fly zone. It seems we continue to be afflicted with historical amnesia. The panic after 9/11, followed by our misbegotten invasion of Iraq, compounded with the fallout after the Arab Spring, seems to have shaken us up too profoundly to think straight. The notion that whatever happens anywhere, any crisis, any collapse of government or famine or outbreak of AIDS is somehow not merely within our power to ameliorate but our ultimate responsibility, whatever the costs-- this presumption appears to have entrenched itself among leaders of both our poitical parties. Like the Old-Testament God, we stand above history, above accountability, above any serious concern about exhausting our resources. We are extraordinary, the spear carriers of American Exceptionalism.
George Washington, leaving office, advised us above all to abhor foreign entanglements. We were a provincial country then, without either the corrupting pressures or the colossal commercial opportunities that present themselves every day as our international corporations infiltrate society after society. Increasingly, not only our State Department but also our swollen military and intelligence bureaucracies have turned into sinister presences, mechanisms of enforcement, throughout much of the Second and Third World. The Islamic suicide bomber is convinced that merely to abide the American occupiers is to doom his own culture. Better for the individual to blow himself up if that means the tribe or clan might make it through.
We've seen this play itself out in Viet Nam, in Iraq, this winter in the aimless, depleting collapse of authority in Afghanistan. We intend to leave soon; after perhaps a season or two of civil war -- like the mayhem portending in Iraq -- Afghanistan will revert to the underlying tribal barbarism indigenous to its culture; a generation of American contractors and arms merchants will load up their bank accounts. Our compounding national debt will continue to threaten to bankrupt our future.
How all this hubris feels on the ground as it is playing itself out comes through on every page of Dexter Filkins' inspired sequence of vignettes in his 2008 memoir The Forever War. I have met Filkins a few times. Softspoken and approachable in person, this ex-reporter for The New York Times -- now on staff with The New Yorker -- conveys better than anybody I have read virtually every aspect of these feckless twin wars of ours. From fighting through the alleys of Falluja, while around him Marine youngsters were getting their faces filleted by grenades, to a diplomatic trip to Tehran with the suave, double-dealing Ahmad Chalabi as he engineers his private accommodation with President Ahmadinejad -- so much is caught on Filkins' pages, the horror and the destroyed hopes and ultimately the cynicism of our suicidal adventures in oil politics.
We are a great nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition. But we are finite, vulnerable, not exceptions in the long run and currently losing ground. We are as subject any other people to our human limitations. Our founding fathers understood this. Will we catch on in time?
For what it's worth. Enjoy this winter weekend.
Burton Hersh
are all available in a highly affordable electronic format at treefarmbooks.com
Showing posts with label American exceptionalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American exceptionalism. Show all posts
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Saturday, December 24, 2011
On Productivity
Countrycelebrants,
Ho ho ho. Tis the day before Christmas, and all through the house my children and grandchildren and all the lizards and cucarachas and fruit rats and assorted hangers-on are muttering carols as they eye the giftwrapped boxes and swig the wassail and dart out to nibble on the crumbs of fruit cake that have hit the tiles during the revels of the midday.
The holidays in Florida. I just returned after acquiring a new cell phone, a gift from our son. The store manager who sold it to us, a recent immigrant from Durban, South Africa, was extraordinary for his endless patience and total competence. Clerks these days so often seem a little at a loss as to how to make change, let alone the intricacies of the warranty.
Which leads me into the subject of the day. I recently watched Donald Trump bitching about the time he spends grinding his teeth on his phone while some purported technician from Mumbai or the Falkland Islands or wherever attempts to talk him through a series of confusing steps that just might get his computer back on line. Frequently in an English incomprehensible outside the Third World. Every subscriber his own electronic repairman. There really aren't a great many issues, political, sociological, what have you, on which Donald Trump makes a lot of sense to me. But this was one. I am considering writing Trump in when the Republican primaries reach Florida.
The real point here is the genuine cost, in time, money, and frustration, of the supposed efficiencies many of the Great Corporations have engineered and managed to hang on us. AT&T and AOL might save money offshoring their back-up services, but what is an hour of Donald Trump's time worth? I know I've brought this up before, but what kind of outcomes does, say, one of my publishers expect when he turns over publicity and promotion responsibilities on my latest book to some sweet, utterly inexperienced -- and unpaid -- intern with an empty rolodex and a lot of apprehension when it comes to dialing up even those individuals on whose radio and TV shows I had appeared a few years earlier, whose contact information I had long since provided. So the calls don't get made, the opportunities are thrown away, and the new book doesn't sell nearly as well as the earlier book, which got a push from accomplished professionals. If only, my disgruntled publisher mutters, my latest work was up to the previous book. But at least he cut his losses in advance by economizing on staff.
What I am obviously getting at is the extent to which our companies, by adopting policies that seem to save money at the time, are undermining a respect for professionalism throughout the economy, discouraging the development of oncoming generations well enough trained -- and well enough paid -- to inherit the work load during the decades coming up, and compromising our industrial future. These days there is virtually no push-back from the dispirited labor unions. Our discussion across most of the political spectrum seems to be about what the rest of us can do to help the rich get richer; every year we seem to be pouring more sand into the cement on which the structure of our future is going to depend. By permitting the lobbiests to shape our tax laws so as to give advantages to the corporations that manufacture and provide services largely overseas, we are expediting the coming economic implosion. The law school graduate subbing as an unpaid intern in some enormous law factory -- and sleeping on her parent's couch, and sweating her graduate-school loans -- faces quite a slog.
Every competent parent knows that he has to invest in his children. The time is long overdue for our leaders to understand that we have got to invest in all our children.
Let the Holidays roll!
Burton
Ho ho ho. Tis the day before Christmas, and all through the house my children and grandchildren and all the lizards and cucarachas and fruit rats and assorted hangers-on are muttering carols as they eye the giftwrapped boxes and swig the wassail and dart out to nibble on the crumbs of fruit cake that have hit the tiles during the revels of the midday.
The holidays in Florida. I just returned after acquiring a new cell phone, a gift from our son. The store manager who sold it to us, a recent immigrant from Durban, South Africa, was extraordinary for his endless patience and total competence. Clerks these days so often seem a little at a loss as to how to make change, let alone the intricacies of the warranty.
Which leads me into the subject of the day. I recently watched Donald Trump bitching about the time he spends grinding his teeth on his phone while some purported technician from Mumbai or the Falkland Islands or wherever attempts to talk him through a series of confusing steps that just might get his computer back on line. Frequently in an English incomprehensible outside the Third World. Every subscriber his own electronic repairman. There really aren't a great many issues, political, sociological, what have you, on which Donald Trump makes a lot of sense to me. But this was one. I am considering writing Trump in when the Republican primaries reach Florida.
The real point here is the genuine cost, in time, money, and frustration, of the supposed efficiencies many of the Great Corporations have engineered and managed to hang on us. AT&T and AOL might save money offshoring their back-up services, but what is an hour of Donald Trump's time worth? I know I've brought this up before, but what kind of outcomes does, say, one of my publishers expect when he turns over publicity and promotion responsibilities on my latest book to some sweet, utterly inexperienced -- and unpaid -- intern with an empty rolodex and a lot of apprehension when it comes to dialing up even those individuals on whose radio and TV shows I had appeared a few years earlier, whose contact information I had long since provided. So the calls don't get made, the opportunities are thrown away, and the new book doesn't sell nearly as well as the earlier book, which got a push from accomplished professionals. If only, my disgruntled publisher mutters, my latest work was up to the previous book. But at least he cut his losses in advance by economizing on staff.
What I am obviously getting at is the extent to which our companies, by adopting policies that seem to save money at the time, are undermining a respect for professionalism throughout the economy, discouraging the development of oncoming generations well enough trained -- and well enough paid -- to inherit the work load during the decades coming up, and compromising our industrial future. These days there is virtually no push-back from the dispirited labor unions. Our discussion across most of the political spectrum seems to be about what the rest of us can do to help the rich get richer; every year we seem to be pouring more sand into the cement on which the structure of our future is going to depend. By permitting the lobbiests to shape our tax laws so as to give advantages to the corporations that manufacture and provide services largely overseas, we are expediting the coming economic implosion. The law school graduate subbing as an unpaid intern in some enormous law factory -- and sleeping on her parent's couch, and sweating her graduate-school loans -- faces quite a slog.
Every competent parent knows that he has to invest in his children. The time is long overdue for our leaders to understand that we have got to invest in all our children.
Let the Holidays roll!
Burton
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Jobs #2
Countryfolk,
Salutations. As perhaps a few of my readers may remember, it has been my intention with this blog to chew away on subjects rarely dealt with in the media -- "What's Left Out" -- , and that hasn't changed. I am returning here for one last -- I hope -- attempt to deal with what is only too hot a topic these days, Jobs, because it is so important and because a number of you have gotten back to me, mainly on e-mail, to agree with -- and challenge -- whatever conclusions I reached.
It seems to me that the intractability of the jobs numbers is the consequence of a number of rising trends and unattended if highly exploitive practices which now characterize what's left of our economy. It is much trumpeted that the American corporations are doing very well despite the recurring recession. This is attributed to their advances in "productivity." But productivity, examined day by day, is achieved by firing employees in America and replacing them with machines or much cheaper workers overseas. As the principal executive at Bain Capital, Mitt Romney specialized in profitably downsizing the work force in companies he and his partners bought out. What might we expect from a Romney presidency?
But there are larger elements in play. Howard Schultz, the head of Starbucks, noted on the air recently that there are now nine million Americans working in manufacturing and thirty million working for the government, local and federal, from mail carriers to four-star generals. If this isn't de facto socialism, where would we find it? As is increasingly noted, the result has been that the trade union movement has largely collapsed, the judiciary and the Congress is increasingly corrupted, and special interests continue to hollow out the laws and mythologize the easily verifiable -- Global Warming -- to our inevitable disaster.
Meanwhile, entire professions have disappeared overnight. Outside the mansions of the superrich the category of backup work that once occupied millions of people -- maids, cooks, personal assistants -- has largely disappeared. Clerical jobs have also thinned out -- even the most exalted communicate by e-mail, I myself carry on direct running exchanges on the internet with individuals who range from CEOs of giant corporations to a Saudi prince. Old ladies wear electronic alert buttons around their necks and let their paid companions go. Jobs, millions of jobs. Joe Nocera opened a NY Times column on August 16 by observing that, during the 2008 financial crisis, German companies instituted a program known as Kurzarbeit, short work, and government subsidies helped by supplementing the workers' paychecks. Imagine getting that one by the Teabaggers.
Special favors are destroying the federal revenue stream. To pump up profits for a handful of corporations we have diverted or cut off the revenue flow we will have to have to support the entitlements programs on which most Americans depend. Trillions of uncollected tax dollars are sequestered in corporative accounts overseas, where they have shipped American jobs, while their executives engage in tantrums in the press, demanding another Bush-era "tax holiday" so they can repatriate the money and fatten their own remuneration packets. Because this works for a handful of exporters, our tariff level vis-a-vis China is two percent, while the Chinese exact an eighteen percent tariff on American goods, which provides them a lot of cash with which to pile up American bonds. The Koch Brothers continue to observe from the wings, writing checks and applauding.
Down in the American street, millions are washing into poverty. One neighbor of mine, a roofer, has been so devastated by brutal property taxes and his effectively unregulated insurance requirements that he has given up his business. He staved this off for a few years by picking up an adjustable-rate subprime mortgage on his house, but inevitably the interest rate was jacked up until it approached twenty percent and he is awaiting foreclosure. His family has fallen apart, and there is no way out. Multiply his case by millions.
Meanwhile, we attempt to inflict what we call civilization on the angry tribesmen of Afghanistan at the American taxpayer's expense. A trillion-dollar stealth fighter-bomber program we have been pursuing for decades has produced a plane that is unflyable. But there is not going to be enough money in the federal treasury before long to continue with Medicaid. What will be left to defend?
But you get the idea. Cheers!
Burton
Salutations. As perhaps a few of my readers may remember, it has been my intention with this blog to chew away on subjects rarely dealt with in the media -- "What's Left Out" -- , and that hasn't changed. I am returning here for one last -- I hope -- attempt to deal with what is only too hot a topic these days, Jobs, because it is so important and because a number of you have gotten back to me, mainly on e-mail, to agree with -- and challenge -- whatever conclusions I reached.
It seems to me that the intractability of the jobs numbers is the consequence of a number of rising trends and unattended if highly exploitive practices which now characterize what's left of our economy. It is much trumpeted that the American corporations are doing very well despite the recurring recession. This is attributed to their advances in "productivity." But productivity, examined day by day, is achieved by firing employees in America and replacing them with machines or much cheaper workers overseas. As the principal executive at Bain Capital, Mitt Romney specialized in profitably downsizing the work force in companies he and his partners bought out. What might we expect from a Romney presidency?
But there are larger elements in play. Howard Schultz, the head of Starbucks, noted on the air recently that there are now nine million Americans working in manufacturing and thirty million working for the government, local and federal, from mail carriers to four-star generals. If this isn't de facto socialism, where would we find it? As is increasingly noted, the result has been that the trade union movement has largely collapsed, the judiciary and the Congress is increasingly corrupted, and special interests continue to hollow out the laws and mythologize the easily verifiable -- Global Warming -- to our inevitable disaster.
Meanwhile, entire professions have disappeared overnight. Outside the mansions of the superrich the category of backup work that once occupied millions of people -- maids, cooks, personal assistants -- has largely disappeared. Clerical jobs have also thinned out -- even the most exalted communicate by e-mail, I myself carry on direct running exchanges on the internet with individuals who range from CEOs of giant corporations to a Saudi prince. Old ladies wear electronic alert buttons around their necks and let their paid companions go. Jobs, millions of jobs. Joe Nocera opened a NY Times column on August 16 by observing that, during the 2008 financial crisis, German companies instituted a program known as Kurzarbeit, short work, and government subsidies helped by supplementing the workers' paychecks. Imagine getting that one by the Teabaggers.
Special favors are destroying the federal revenue stream. To pump up profits for a handful of corporations we have diverted or cut off the revenue flow we will have to have to support the entitlements programs on which most Americans depend. Trillions of uncollected tax dollars are sequestered in corporative accounts overseas, where they have shipped American jobs, while their executives engage in tantrums in the press, demanding another Bush-era "tax holiday" so they can repatriate the money and fatten their own remuneration packets. Because this works for a handful of exporters, our tariff level vis-a-vis China is two percent, while the Chinese exact an eighteen percent tariff on American goods, which provides them a lot of cash with which to pile up American bonds. The Koch Brothers continue to observe from the wings, writing checks and applauding.
Down in the American street, millions are washing into poverty. One neighbor of mine, a roofer, has been so devastated by brutal property taxes and his effectively unregulated insurance requirements that he has given up his business. He staved this off for a few years by picking up an adjustable-rate subprime mortgage on his house, but inevitably the interest rate was jacked up until it approached twenty percent and he is awaiting foreclosure. His family has fallen apart, and there is no way out. Multiply his case by millions.
Meanwhile, we attempt to inflict what we call civilization on the angry tribesmen of Afghanistan at the American taxpayer's expense. A trillion-dollar stealth fighter-bomber program we have been pursuing for decades has produced a plane that is unflyable. But there is not going to be enough money in the federal treasury before long to continue with Medicaid. What will be left to defend?
But you get the idea. Cheers!
Burton
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Jobs
Countrypersons,
First, and emphatically: I'm no economist. I've looked at the ideas of a good many economists over the years, from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, and anybody who has immersed himself in contemporary history as I have can't remain completely oblivious to the underlying economic shifts, the tectonic plates which underlie the frenzy of politics. Still, look elsewhere for professional comment. For what they're worth, here are my ideas.
We may be passing -- and faster than we can deal with the upshots -- from one era during which certain economic arrangements kept things reasonably stable into another, a time when the implicit longstanding social and financial tradeoffs simply will not work going forward. As a species we have done this before, as when we developed from migrating hunter-gatherers into farmers and ranchers, or feudal landlords into mercantilist adventurers. Now -- riding on the explosive science and technology which are the great achievements and challenges of our time -- we may be attempting to contend politically with profound changes for which the old procedures are largely irrelevant, like people struggling to deal with a massive earthquake by passing a municipal ordinance.
The politics of our time is based on the interaction of different interest groups who elect public officials or influence public officials to give them the handouts they want. Everything we are fighting over -- the entitlement programs, subsidies for the oil boys, a bloated military and intelligence community and the constant itch to "project power" and rebuild other people's countries -- comes out of that. Here in the United States we are living in the hollowed-out remains of a gigantic industrial and financial colossus that emerged from World War II, much of which we have relocated offshore or turned over to automated machinery. Even in the white-collar professions, ambitious graduates get out of law school and find that the only jobs available are as unpaid interns, while underpaid clerks on the internet in New Delhi deal with the discovery research which once justified the American firms in taking on new associates. Soon advanced computer programs will replace the flunkies in India.
This sort of thing leaves a permanently underemployed and fast deteriorating middle class in America to find whatever existence it can on our economic margins, too often demanding public assistance. Because of radical advances in medicine our citizens are living perhaps twenty years longer -- assisted by expensive medical procedures -- and running up Social Security and Medicare obligations for the government. Many trillions are now projected. The fantastic profits resulting from these technological breakthroughs and the exploitation of world markets has drifted almost entirely into the hands of the most fortunate 5% -- some say 1% -- of our citizens, the most venal of whom utilize it to propagandise the susceptible masses, grab off more favorable treatment by their intimidated government, buy the Supreme Court, and stifle even the suggestion of a more equitable taxation pattern.
Liberal boilerplate, I know. But all this is moving us toward revolution, quite possibly some sort of collectivist nightmare very few of us really want. If radical change comes, the billionaires will go first. Before that happens, perhaps we should think this through. Why not a permanent, federally funded jobs program to rebuild our collapsing infrastructure and backstop the economy? FDR did it. Why not a thirty-hour work week, like -- shudder! -- France? If machines are increasingly doing the work, shouldn't the average citizen benefit to some extent? There is quite probably a reason why the societies of Northern Europe -- which have let the public-private equation evolve while we have paralyzed our own political progress -- are excaping the current financial meltdown. Not very long ago we went to the moon. Today our bridges are collapsing. When will we summon up the nerve to stop cannibalizing our young?
Cheers.
Burton
One last thing. The reader who wanted me to validate a Ted Kennedy quote can reach me on my internet address, bandehersh@aol.com. I will reply.
First, and emphatically: I'm no economist. I've looked at the ideas of a good many economists over the years, from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, and anybody who has immersed himself in contemporary history as I have can't remain completely oblivious to the underlying economic shifts, the tectonic plates which underlie the frenzy of politics. Still, look elsewhere for professional comment. For what they're worth, here are my ideas.
We may be passing -- and faster than we can deal with the upshots -- from one era during which certain economic arrangements kept things reasonably stable into another, a time when the implicit longstanding social and financial tradeoffs simply will not work going forward. As a species we have done this before, as when we developed from migrating hunter-gatherers into farmers and ranchers, or feudal landlords into mercantilist adventurers. Now -- riding on the explosive science and technology which are the great achievements and challenges of our time -- we may be attempting to contend politically with profound changes for which the old procedures are largely irrelevant, like people struggling to deal with a massive earthquake by passing a municipal ordinance.
The politics of our time is based on the interaction of different interest groups who elect public officials or influence public officials to give them the handouts they want. Everything we are fighting over -- the entitlement programs, subsidies for the oil boys, a bloated military and intelligence community and the constant itch to "project power" and rebuild other people's countries -- comes out of that. Here in the United States we are living in the hollowed-out remains of a gigantic industrial and financial colossus that emerged from World War II, much of which we have relocated offshore or turned over to automated machinery. Even in the white-collar professions, ambitious graduates get out of law school and find that the only jobs available are as unpaid interns, while underpaid clerks on the internet in New Delhi deal with the discovery research which once justified the American firms in taking on new associates. Soon advanced computer programs will replace the flunkies in India.
This sort of thing leaves a permanently underemployed and fast deteriorating middle class in America to find whatever existence it can on our economic margins, too often demanding public assistance. Because of radical advances in medicine our citizens are living perhaps twenty years longer -- assisted by expensive medical procedures -- and running up Social Security and Medicare obligations for the government. Many trillions are now projected. The fantastic profits resulting from these technological breakthroughs and the exploitation of world markets has drifted almost entirely into the hands of the most fortunate 5% -- some say 1% -- of our citizens, the most venal of whom utilize it to propagandise the susceptible masses, grab off more favorable treatment by their intimidated government, buy the Supreme Court, and stifle even the suggestion of a more equitable taxation pattern.
Liberal boilerplate, I know. But all this is moving us toward revolution, quite possibly some sort of collectivist nightmare very few of us really want. If radical change comes, the billionaires will go first. Before that happens, perhaps we should think this through. Why not a permanent, federally funded jobs program to rebuild our collapsing infrastructure and backstop the economy? FDR did it. Why not a thirty-hour work week, like -- shudder! -- France? If machines are increasingly doing the work, shouldn't the average citizen benefit to some extent? There is quite probably a reason why the societies of Northern Europe -- which have let the public-private equation evolve while we have paralyzed our own political progress -- are excaping the current financial meltdown. Not very long ago we went to the moon. Today our bridges are collapsing. When will we summon up the nerve to stop cannibalizing our young?
Cheers.
Burton
One last thing. The reader who wanted me to validate a Ted Kennedy quote can reach me on my internet address, bandehersh@aol.com. I will reply.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
When Populism Goes Feral
Countryfollowers,
Having neglected this blog to a certain extent while attacking the last chapters of the novel that has been throttling my summer the way a terrier does a rat, I hope to catch you all up now. It's time to elaborate on my earlier elaborations. Run for the exits, now, before the second paragraph heaves into view!
It may be that I was a little bit on edge about being termed a "lefty." This was partly because I'm not, but it was also partly because I have spent a fair amount of time drifting around in societies ostensibly organized around "socialist" principles. Starting in the nineteen fifties I began to drop into, cultivate friendships inside, hitchhike through, and in general draw my own conclusions about what were called at the time the "Iron Curtain" communities. These came to include East Berlin, Poland, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and -- this was after the Berlin Wall came down -- Moscow, which I was invited by several ex-KGB generals to visit as an intelligence journalist.
Very little I ran into persuaded me that pure socialism -- that is, communities in which, as Karl Marx put it, the government alone owned and operated the 'means of production,' (factories, mines, etc.) -- had much of a future, there or here. What I kept encountering was unbelievable environmental degradation and pervasive thought control, police states with terrified and unproductive and increasingly restive populations. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" was one prevalent explanation for the pitiful standard of living.
A section of the novel I just finished takes place in Cuba, which gave me the first opportunity to think about this fossilized remnant of what was once an egalitarian dream since dealing with the forces behind JFK's botched invasion of the island in Bobby and J. Edgar. To understand what day-to-day life in the Pearl of the Antilles is about take a look at Havana Real by Yoani Sanchez, an gutsy and penetrating stay-behind in rotting Havana. Before Castro, under Fulgencio Batista, as Ben Corbett has written, "Soldiers shot and killed humans as if they were rodents. The dinner conversation revolved around which politicians should be assassinated."
Nether Cuba holds much of an attraction, at least for me. Both demonstrate what happens when one interest group in the population, whether an entrenched bureaucracy or a coalition of dominant property-holders, assumes all power and rules a society exclusively to advance its perceived immediate interests. Reality gets blocked out -- Hitler was Stalin's soulmate in 1940, and Tea Party candidates like Michele Bachmann characterize global warming as a "hoax."
Only genuine pluralism, whether economic or political, in which competing ideas and interests can keep the process engaged enough to permit at least a minimum of truth to leak into our media, can give our flagging democracy a chance at survival. Right-Wing think tanks are pushing model legislation on dumbed-down state governments which would outlaw collective bargaining and install right-to-work laws in much of the country. What is left of the American labor union movement -- the historic counterpart to the corporate lobbying Leviathan -- is already a remnant, beaten to its knees and acceding to "two-track" contracts that undermine its surviving membership. Wherever outsourcing isn't practical, robots do the heavy lifting. The chairman at General Motors was pleased to point out the other day that labor costs have fallen to10% from 25-30% of the cost of most completed vehicles.
Where is this taking us? Where are the jobs and the consumers supposed to come from? Where will the middle class have gone?
If you know, by all means let me hear.
Burton
Having neglected this blog to a certain extent while attacking the last chapters of the novel that has been throttling my summer the way a terrier does a rat, I hope to catch you all up now. It's time to elaborate on my earlier elaborations. Run for the exits, now, before the second paragraph heaves into view!
It may be that I was a little bit on edge about being termed a "lefty." This was partly because I'm not, but it was also partly because I have spent a fair amount of time drifting around in societies ostensibly organized around "socialist" principles. Starting in the nineteen fifties I began to drop into, cultivate friendships inside, hitchhike through, and in general draw my own conclusions about what were called at the time the "Iron Curtain" communities. These came to include East Berlin, Poland, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and -- this was after the Berlin Wall came down -- Moscow, which I was invited by several ex-KGB generals to visit as an intelligence journalist.
Very little I ran into persuaded me that pure socialism -- that is, communities in which, as Karl Marx put it, the government alone owned and operated the 'means of production,' (factories, mines, etc.) -- had much of a future, there or here. What I kept encountering was unbelievable environmental degradation and pervasive thought control, police states with terrified and unproductive and increasingly restive populations. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" was one prevalent explanation for the pitiful standard of living.
A section of the novel I just finished takes place in Cuba, which gave me the first opportunity to think about this fossilized remnant of what was once an egalitarian dream since dealing with the forces behind JFK's botched invasion of the island in Bobby and J. Edgar. To understand what day-to-day life in the Pearl of the Antilles is about take a look at Havana Real by Yoani Sanchez, an gutsy and penetrating stay-behind in rotting Havana. Before Castro, under Fulgencio Batista, as Ben Corbett has written, "Soldiers shot and killed humans as if they were rodents. The dinner conversation revolved around which politicians should be assassinated."
Nether Cuba holds much of an attraction, at least for me. Both demonstrate what happens when one interest group in the population, whether an entrenched bureaucracy or a coalition of dominant property-holders, assumes all power and rules a society exclusively to advance its perceived immediate interests. Reality gets blocked out -- Hitler was Stalin's soulmate in 1940, and Tea Party candidates like Michele Bachmann characterize global warming as a "hoax."
Only genuine pluralism, whether economic or political, in which competing ideas and interests can keep the process engaged enough to permit at least a minimum of truth to leak into our media, can give our flagging democracy a chance at survival. Right-Wing think tanks are pushing model legislation on dumbed-down state governments which would outlaw collective bargaining and install right-to-work laws in much of the country. What is left of the American labor union movement -- the historic counterpart to the corporate lobbying Leviathan -- is already a remnant, beaten to its knees and acceding to "two-track" contracts that undermine its surviving membership. Wherever outsourcing isn't practical, robots do the heavy lifting. The chairman at General Motors was pleased to point out the other day that labor costs have fallen to10% from 25-30% of the cost of most completed vehicles.
Where is this taking us? Where are the jobs and the consumers supposed to come from? Where will the middle class have gone?
If you know, by all means let me hear.
Burton
Monday, August 1, 2011
Socialist America
Countrypeople,
Again, another mile or so on the slow slog toward rationality. I have just finished my electrifying new novel, so I am free to lecture you helpless victims about matters that ought to be obvious at this point. Therefore:
Not long ago my wife's adventurous step-brother, John Townsend, commented on the way I bristled at being termed a "leftie" by Steve Mumford by suggesting that I had probably overreacted. He himself was a little concerned that the Republican Hard Right was calling Obama a "socialist." Socialism, after all, is anathema to the American Way.
As the astute Fareek Zakaria noted in a recent Sunday morning commentary on CNN, the fact is, federal agencies have always played a major -- very often a dominating -- role in America's economic development. From the first Land Grant and Homesteading Acts to the Louisiana Purchase to the underwriting of the transcontinental railroad to herding the Indians onto reservations to picking a fight with Mexico so we could acquire the Southwest to taking over heavy industry during both World Wars -- both times putting Bernard Baruch in charge -- to overseeing the production of the aircraft carriers and B-17s that destroyed the Japanese Navy and the Nazi industrial capacity (taking out Peenemunde alone ended German ball-bearing production, and grounded the Luftwaffe) -- all government initiatives and control, all vital to our survival and development. More recently the Manhattan Project provided our Cold War atomic defense structure, NASA landed us on the moon, federal research produced the internet, the National Institute of Health has come up with most of the real breakthroughs in modern medicine. And as for education, etc....
It would be hard to find a society this side of the old Iron Curtain in which governmental initiatives and collusive management have played a larger part historically. By far the greatest beneficiaries of this overwhelming involvement of the public sector have been the lions of private industry, where the utilization of a wealth of patents and the enormously lucrative contracts and the world-wide protection of both the American military and the intelligence services -- which have regularly functioned as collection agencies for threatened American corporations -- have produced generation after generation of augmented profit.
This arrangement goes back a number of generations. In The Old Boys I went into detail as to how all this destroyed working democracies in Nicaragua and Iran, the sort of toxic collusion that Dwight Eisenhower was referring to in his late-day warnings about the intent of the "military-industrial complex." The stacked-up profits this strategic alliance have produced have increasingly been protected from federal taxes in foreign tax havens. Heavy federal subsidies have gone to influential companies, from coal and oil to airlines to agribusiness. Jobs -- at first blue-collar and increasingly white-collar -- have gone off-shore by the millions. A system of loopholes, lobbyists, and a stacked federal court has evolved to protect these privileges.
As the government's recent response in rescuing the banks and the auto companies would suggest, the protections of a Socialistic society will be extended automatically to the special interests after they have blundered into insolvency. The rest of us -- prepare for legislated pauperization. What little the "entitlements" have promised is on the legislative chopping block. The Trade Union Movement in America is all but destroyed. Part of the Second World already, it's going to be a fight for us to hang onto even that.
Have I cheered you up?
Burton Hersh
Again, another mile or so on the slow slog toward rationality. I have just finished my electrifying new novel, so I am free to lecture you helpless victims about matters that ought to be obvious at this point. Therefore:
Not long ago my wife's adventurous step-brother, John Townsend, commented on the way I bristled at being termed a "leftie" by Steve Mumford by suggesting that I had probably overreacted. He himself was a little concerned that the Republican Hard Right was calling Obama a "socialist." Socialism, after all, is anathema to the American Way.
As the astute Fareek Zakaria noted in a recent Sunday morning commentary on CNN, the fact is, federal agencies have always played a major -- very often a dominating -- role in America's economic development. From the first Land Grant and Homesteading Acts to the Louisiana Purchase to the underwriting of the transcontinental railroad to herding the Indians onto reservations to picking a fight with Mexico so we could acquire the Southwest to taking over heavy industry during both World Wars -- both times putting Bernard Baruch in charge -- to overseeing the production of the aircraft carriers and B-17s that destroyed the Japanese Navy and the Nazi industrial capacity (taking out Peenemunde alone ended German ball-bearing production, and grounded the Luftwaffe) -- all government initiatives and control, all vital to our survival and development. More recently the Manhattan Project provided our Cold War atomic defense structure, NASA landed us on the moon, federal research produced the internet, the National Institute of Health has come up with most of the real breakthroughs in modern medicine. And as for education, etc....
It would be hard to find a society this side of the old Iron Curtain in which governmental initiatives and collusive management have played a larger part historically. By far the greatest beneficiaries of this overwhelming involvement of the public sector have been the lions of private industry, where the utilization of a wealth of patents and the enormously lucrative contracts and the world-wide protection of both the American military and the intelligence services -- which have regularly functioned as collection agencies for threatened American corporations -- have produced generation after generation of augmented profit.
This arrangement goes back a number of generations. In The Old Boys I went into detail as to how all this destroyed working democracies in Nicaragua and Iran, the sort of toxic collusion that Dwight Eisenhower was referring to in his late-day warnings about the intent of the "military-industrial complex." The stacked-up profits this strategic alliance have produced have increasingly been protected from federal taxes in foreign tax havens. Heavy federal subsidies have gone to influential companies, from coal and oil to airlines to agribusiness. Jobs -- at first blue-collar and increasingly white-collar -- have gone off-shore by the millions. A system of loopholes, lobbyists, and a stacked federal court has evolved to protect these privileges.
As the government's recent response in rescuing the banks and the auto companies would suggest, the protections of a Socialistic society will be extended automatically to the special interests after they have blundered into insolvency. The rest of us -- prepare for legislated pauperization. What little the "entitlements" have promised is on the legislative chopping block. The Trade Union Movement in America is all but destroyed. Part of the Second World already, it's going to be a fight for us to hang onto even that.
Have I cheered you up?
Burton Hersh
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