Gadfly: Between Outrage and Depression

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
A novelist being interviewed on National Public Radio was asked what impressed him the most while visiting 30 U.S. cities hawking his book. He said he had talked to thousands of people during his book tour and discovered that even those who could afford the $35 for his book seemed to be consumed by outrage or were depressed about what was happening to the middle class.

Being a news junkie extraordinaire, I get the same impression from the mainstream press. That’s why I have used the above title. T.S. Eliot’s lines in “The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock” describe today’s depression of our middle class well:
  “I grow old….I grow old….I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
    Shall I part my hair behind?  Do I dare to eat a peach?  I have heard the mermaids
    Singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
    I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of silent seas.”
It seems whenever people try to reach across the aisle, street, path, or sacristy today somebody yells “Stop!” Lyons, France has many immigrant Muslims from Algeria, a former French colony. An old Roman Catholic cathedral in Lyons was in the last stages of a forty-year restoration when Emmanuel Fourchet, the chief sculptor, decided to honor a Muslim stonemason who had spent forty years working on the cathedral. He had the image of the Muslim stonemason immortalized in a stone gargoyle near the top of the cathedral facade. The sculptor said it was a symbol of interreligious friendship with the inscription “God Is Great” engraved in both French and Arabic.  Stonemason Ahmed Benzizine says his image on the gargoyle projects “a message of peace and tolerance.” But a small cadre of extreme right-wingers is attacking the sculptor and the Lyons Archdiocese for the gargoyle. The rector of the cathedral says, “There is no religion that doesn’t say ‘God is Great’.”
Are Free Markets Actually Destroying the U.S.?
Material self-interest dominates our politics today. Art, literature, music, and theater classes are sacrificed for science, math, and business classes in our schools. An obsession with wealth and profit, the movement to privatize government services, the constant appeal to cut taxes, the drumbeat “to drown government in a bathtub” filled with red ink, and funding foreign wars on credit cards for future generations to pay all highlight the “me-me” years starting with Ronald Reagan.

We don’t even bother to budget for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while our highways and bridges are broken, our cities are bankrupt, and schools are underfunded while China is connecting 42 cities with high-speed trains, while Newsweek magazine determines we are #11 in the world instead of #1.

We are often called the richest country in the world but we are operating with “Greed is Good” social and economic mentalities.  History has proven that unequal societies are unhappy and unhealthy.  Our rich-poor gap is the greatest among industrialized nations while our infant mortality rates would be shameful even in Africa.

A new book by Tony Judt, “Ill Fares The Land,” states that our empire is in serious trouble because we have emphasized profit and riches over community for the past thirty years. It’s a simple fact that Europe with its social democracies has done a much better job than we have in creating “community.” We lead the industrialized world in poverty rates, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness rates, incarceration rates, and the income gap between the rich and poor.

In the 1970’s the idea that the point of life was to get rich was highly ridiculed. Now Wall Street bankers have so ruled the social conscience that they have even convinced some religious forces that the way to the fundamentalist rapture is to foster a “prosperity” gospel in mega-churches where one prays for riches instead of salvation while the preacher flies around the world in his private jet and drives around his neighborhood in a Rolls-Royce.
A Period of Tax, Spend, and Progress for Everybody
Judt says the period from 1945 to 1975 saw job security, economic opportunity, and social mobility advance on an unprecedented scale. The GI Bill brought first-class educations to millions of war veterans who did not have a pot or window.

It was a period of public ownership, the growth of parks and recreation for all regardless of wealth or influence, the building of huge government dams and interstate highways running vertically and horizontally across the United States, a period of REA electricity for everybody, and passenger planes flying to almost every small city in the country. The construction authorized by the Tennessee Valley Authority served the populace of a democratic multi-state area instead of being called part of a great communist conspiracy. Then greed returned.

Human needs and desires were put on hold for ever-faster assembly lines, two-tier salary plans, and the development of factory farms, whether egg, pig, or cow.
Jack Welch of General Electric was applauded for good business practices when he said he would like to put all of GE’s manufacturing plants on ocean barges so they could easily be towed to cheap labor spots in the world. That plan soon came to pass. Our manufacturing base was shipped lock, stock, barrel, and jobs overseas where workers made $1 an hour instead of $28.50. Now General Motors pays its hourly labor $28.50 in the U.S. while the same car is assembled in Mexico for $7 an hour.

Judt makes an important point for economists to think about: “Economic life depends on trust, which in our present social orders is likely to be in short supply. Men and women need to feel valued if they are to be productive, which is scarcely the case with those at the bottom of the heap. They are unlikely to flourish without some sense of stable identity and robust community, both of which are continually under threat in the world of advanced capitalism. Once the state hands over its functions of care (social benefits, unemployment pay, health care, veterans benefits,  etc) to private agencies, nothing remains to bind the citizen to the state but the fear of authority.” 

The result of cutting ties to a society, according to Judt, creates an “eviscerated society, one stripped of the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities.”
So Here Comes the Tea Party
We are living in unsettled times, primarily because greed won over reason. Bankers loaned money to people who couldn’t afford homes because the banks didn’t have to hold the mortgages in their personal wallets. They sold the mortgages out the bank’s back door like a guy selling fake Rolexes on the streets of New York. Then the guys with the Rolexes sold the mortgages under false pretenses to investors who had larceny in their hearts, who then bundled them into huge piles of economic crap without a pony, and then sold them to suckers all over the world.

Bankers were so eager to fill their pockets that they forgot that accurate records of who actually owned the mortgage should be prepared. They hired Ponzi schemers and incompetents to check the mortgage documents.

As an example, JP Morgan Chase, one of the largest holders of mortgages, hired a “document execution specialist” who had spent nine years as a housekeeper, teacher’s aide, and WalMart clerk. She also had trouble speaking English. She signed affidavits stating that she had examined the mortgage documents and found them to be accurate. In truth she had no idea what she was signing.

The mortgage mess created by banks is so bad one couple in Florida lost their home to foreclosure—when they had no mortgage!

It’s too bad the Tea Party movement was actually founded by the billionaire Koch brothers who make all of their money from fossil fuels. They have hired former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey, that good ol’ boy from Cando, North Dakota, to lead an organization called Freedom Works. No doubt the Kochs are funding many of the 138 Tea Party candidates running for the house and senate–all on the Republican ticket.

The various Tea Party groups are a curious mix of basically white people favoring God and guns and hating gays. They are ignoramuses and libertarians, racists and constitutionalists, flat taxers and no taxers, deficit hawks and torture advocates, and universal healthcare protesters depressed by Obamacare.

Many Tea Partiers belong to secessionist groups who want to establish their own countries. TheNewAmericaTheCountry.org is trying to buy up to 200,000 square miles “somewhere” in the United States to establish an independent country. An outfit called the Cascadian Independence Project wants to make a new country out of British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington. Todd Palin’s Alaska Independence Party wants to secede from the U.S. and then privatize all of its federal lands. The Texas governor would like it to return to pre-1845 borders and form the United Republic of Texas composed of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming. (There are other groups. Read all about them in the latest Mother Jones magazine.)
Why Aren’t Tea Partiers Protesting on Wall Street or K Street?
Tea Party members are not rich, although they can fly around the country attending $600 conventions, stay in $400 hotel rooms, and buy all sorts of interesting patriotic costumes. Country club memberships? I don’t know, but they don’t look like it. According to the facts, none of this group on average has enjoyed any economic gain in 30 years.

Only the top 20 percent have made gains over that period. And most of those gains have gone to people making over $1.9 million. One would think they would be protesting on Republican Wall Street where huge bonuses are about to be paid–again. 

Why are they so outraged by the government when they have been getting screwed by bankers for decades? They are now being taxed for less than they were under George W. Bush—but they are outraged by Barack Hussein Obama! Where do they get their information? They don’t seem to be angry at the rich!

Why be pissed at the bottom making $7.25 an hour instead of at a guy at the top making $3 billion a year who is taxed less than they are? Is it ignorance? Is it because Obama is black? We are living in a very complex society that requires a citizen to work hard to stay informed. You can’t do it by just watching Fox News.
After all, we should all know that God is a liberal by now. The conservative Family Research Council admitted they had many prayer sessions to ensure that Obamacare wouldn’t pass congress. It passed. Could it be a case of “divine neglect?”
Palin and the Mama Grizzlies
I see Sarah Palin has had a number of women join her Mama Grizzly movement: Nikki Haley, running for governor of South Carolina; Carly Fiorina, senate candidate in California; Susanna Martinez, candidate for governor of New Mexico; Michele Bachmann, Republican representative from Minnesota; and Sharon Angle, running against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada.

Palin says Mama Grizzlies protect their cubs ferociously and want to keep the government out of their lives. Is this why they are against increasing Pell Grants for college? Against minimum wage laws? Against Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, overtime pay, food and restaurant inspections, mine safety laws, oil drilling regulations, food stamps, the Medical Leave Act, Wall Street regulations, seat belt and motorcycle helmet laws, against clean air and clean water laws–and thousands of other laws and regulations that protect citizens from rapacious hedge fund operators and the Bernie Madoffs of the world?
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