Every human being is unique, but maybe you are more unique than others

One of the things I learned in grand jury duty is that they were not my peers. Could I be fairly judged anywhere? Is each of us so unique that we are peerless?

A friend offered the phrase in the title as a response: Every human being is unique, but maybe you are more unique than others.

Ever since the 1960s, after which everyone had to be "creative"* and, of course, of such individuality as to be unique, people have been going around saying idiotic, self-contradictory things such as "everyone is special" (said by a Special Education teacher, in front of a crowd that included a politician whose kid was in her class). I loved the 1960s and would not reverse them by any means, but some things got misunderstood.

One of them is this business of uniqueness. Saying everyone is unique is a way of saying no one is.

Of course, our fingerprints and DNA are, at some cellular and micro-molecular levels, unique. However, let's not get too carried away by that. Because we all have DNA and fingerprints, and in that respect we are universally like one another.

We are, if we think of the Creator as a painter and the elements of our being the colors of a palette, variations or hues from the same range of possibilities. In the beginning, She painted one person tall and one person short, one fat, one skinny, one dark, one more pale and so forth.

Of course, given 7 billion** people, the number of possibilities is pretty large.

I applied the numbers to myself. I belong to a number of people in our era who, as a result of parents' background and peripatetic jobs, were born in the 1950s as part of a cultural fusion, anticipating by decades the effects of globalization and instant global communication (the Internet). In my case the mix was unlikely, as the two particular national cultures included that of Argentina and of the United States.

There are 41.3 million Argentines, or 0.59% of the world's population and 312.8 million Americans, 4.47% of the world's human beings. A probability calculation yields a 2.65% of the world's population that has the same two cultural components.

I am male, so I must pare that down by half (1.33% of all people). I am part of the post-World War II "baby boom" generation, which represents roughly 17% of the population (down to 0.07% of all people).

That's pretty unique, you'll say. And I haven't counted other distinguishing characteristics: hair and skin color, height and weight, languages spoken, education attainment and so on and so forth.

There remains the fact that the science of medicine that applies to other people applies to me. My liver may function differently from yours, but we both have livers and the medicine to cure mine will more than likely cure yours.

Indeed, if we were truly unique, we could not have language and communication (yes, most people are very bad at this) nor any kind of collective characteristics.

Still, perhaps I tend to be rare because I speak two languages with an identical and very high proficiency, plus a few others only a smattering, or just enough for etymology, history or exegesis, all hobbies of mine.

Among Argentine-Americans (of whom I know only my half-siblings), I am among the half (mathematical odds) that chose to fight the unaccepting social environment of one part of my culture, rather than flee the conflict.

I became the contrarian whose musings populate this blog by the force of habit. I almost expect people to disagree with me and vice versa.

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* To create still means to make something from nothing, to originate the existence of something. No human being is creative; we are, at best and hope the crick don't rise, innovative in our arrangement of what there is.

** All population figures are for 2012 for comparability.

Gee, I hope the pope is a smarter Jesuit than James Martin!

A friend called my attention to USCCB Blog sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops¹ on Google's dime, apparently. The most recent entry features "Three Steps to Reduce Income Disparities," supposedly personal advice that is assinine as only a cleric can write. This one claims to know something about the economy.

Here is the personal prescription "to reduce income disparities": 1) Educate yourself; 2) Pay a just wage. 3) Honor human dignity.

Oh, sure! I went to college and I have covered poverty for 30 years and -- shazam! -- income disparities were reduced. Not!

As to paying just wages, the pay of the 243 million U.S. workers in this country, is set by roughly 27 million people (11 percent of the workforce) in the U.S. economy who actually control wages and salaries². In other words, item number 2 can only be put into practice by about 1 in 10 people.

Lastly, there's the matter of "honor" for "human dignity." I swear I hold human dignity in high regard; in fact, last I checked I was human myself. Which worker's wage just went up and which Fortune 500 CEO saw his pay sliced down to human scale because I said I honor human dignity? Well, speak up, I can't hear you.

So zero, zero and, to be different, nought.

Now if the author of these practical hints for making income less unequal was, say, the good Father Joe O'Brien, an imaginary but proverbial classic Irish-American parish priest who can't tell Keynes from Friedman, OK, I'd give him a pass. Priests don't know spit about money (except how to cajole for it) and bishops think that good management is saving string.

But no, Father James Martin, SJ, takes the time to brag that " I worked for six years at General Electric in their finance department. Before that, I studied at the Wharton School of Business, where I majored in finance, which also meant taking courses in accounting, management, securities, bonds and real estate."

Then he has the gall to write: "Why am I telling you this? Not to brag, but to establish a bit of bona fides when it come to talking about the economy, about business and about work on this Labor Day."

Really? Wharton does not teach enough about the economy that a graduate can't tell that these three pieces of "advice" are, to be polite, smellier that taurine excrement?

And, hey, he has that SJ for "Society of Jesus" (aka the Jesuits) after his name. The Jesuits are supposed to be smart. You sure he's not a Dominican or Franciscan or ... gasp! ... a lowly diocesan priest?

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1. Truth in labelling: I was an employee from very, very long ago.
2. Truth in labelling, again: I am an employer and I do decide wages and salaries.

Something very good happened

Surprise! Not everything is bad and going to the dogs. Some very basic good things happened if you have a long enough perspective. I was reminded of this in a very clever op-ed piece by restaurant critic Phyllis Richman in The Washington Post.

I’ll give your the WaPo’s teaser (the whole piece is well worth reading):

In 1961, Phyllis Richman applied to graduate school at Harvard. She received a letter asking how she would balance a career in city planning with her ‘responsibilities’ to her husband and possible future family. Fifty-two years later, she responds.

Read the whole piece here.

Living as we do in the Orwellian world of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four—where the reigning slogans were WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH— it is hard to believe that anything has improved, as on a daily basis we witness progressive deterioration of everything.

After all, we live in a time of

• peace characterized by war on "terror";
• promotion of a morbid consumption that wipes out ever lower inflation-adjusted slave wages, plunging us into the "freedom" of bankruptcy; and
• ignorance yawning as wide as the Grand Canyon, with news coming in the form of either comedic satire or biased propaganda.

And Big Brother is watching us.

It doesn’t surprise me, actually. In the real year 1984, the United States had an actor play acting the role of president with scripts very obviously provided by the "them" who produce and direct our society.

Why should things have improved since then?

The Oval Office since then saw: a man who had coined the term “Reaganomics” claiming he was not in the loop when it was implemented by his running mate; a man whose “centrism” was suspiciously helpful to the greatest orgy Wall Street had ever had; a man who invented a war to justify two invasions without bringing the criminals charged with the defining event to justice; and, finally today, a man who fooled us but good that he would bring change.

1984 was never meant to be a futuristic novel. Orwell picked his title as a play on 1948, the year he finished writing the novel. 1984 is now, a fact I found hard to believe when I first read it in my idealistic adolescence.

So, yes, our present is terribly bleak. But a funny thing happened on the way to this bleakness.

Women stopped being universally regarded as baby-making and housekeeping serfs. Black people, and all peoples who were not white-bread American, stopped being universally regarded as a permanent underclass whose exceptional members make great entertainers and athletes.

More recently, we learn that the world is ahead of schedule in meeting one of the U.N. eight Millennium Development Goals adopted in 2001: extreme poverty has been halved.

What else that is unquestionably a move forward is happening? Shouldn't we be more aware of the sustained progress we are making?

I don't mean we should be taken in by the feel-good advertising of the iPhone, although I love that gentle piano, or any corporation's claim to doing good while doing (obscenely and disproportionately) well.

Let's not be naive. But would it kill us to smell some of the roses in our garden?

Documentary Displays More Anglo "Left" Learned Ignorance

Yesterday, upon the 30th anniversary of the murder of four American women in El Salvador, I was reminded of the way even alleged do-gooders from the navel-gazing Anglo culture steals everything from Hispania: the documentary Roses in December.

In case you missed it, the film is a heart-string-pulling manipulative piece of pseudo-lefty Catholic propaganda about the deaths on Dec. 2, 1982, of three American nuns and one non-vowed "missionary" from Ohio.

What's wrong with that, you ask? After all, the torture, rapes and murders were heinous acts of a dictatorial military regime supported by the United States government.

There's lots wrong: I'll tell you.

First of all, that very same week, as with hundreds of weeks that followed, between 300 to 500 Salvadorans were tortured, murdered and, if female, raped -- without notice or documentaries, anywhere. It had been happening in a crescendo since at least 1980.

Second of all, what was so effing great about four white Americans slumming their way to alleged sainthood? Sure, they we were providing food, shelter and medical care. But have you seen the little palaces with armed guards in which U.S. missionaries live? They have cars (that no one else has), they fly home for rest periods. No Salvadoran lives like they do -- oh, yes, the wealthy and their clergy pets do.

Third, the title of the movie "Roses in December" is a cultural theft of Mexican and Mexican-American popular culture for the purpose of idealizing four Americans in El Salvador. Note to Anglos: Mexico and El Salvador are different countries, have different customs, eat different things ... even if they all look the same to you.

Huh, you say?

"Roses in December" is the key phrase in the story of an Indian named Juan Diego on Dec. 9, 1531, when he said he saw a girl of about 15 or 16 surrounded by light. The young woman in the apparition spoke to him in his native Nahuatl asking that a church be built on that site in her honor. Juan Diego said he recognized her as the long venerated Virgin Mary, or Myriam of Nazareth, mother of Jesus.

When the bishop asked Juan Diego to demand a sign from the Virgin, to prove it was she, the native said the Virgin told her to gather flowers from what was normally a barren hill. He put them in his cloak to protect them and when he unrapped the cloak in front of the bishop and his staff, out came red Castilian roses in full bloom that were not native to Mexico and wouldn't normally blossom in December.

"Roses in December!" was the exclamation of those who saw it. Ever since, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans make a huge deal of this phrase. It was the divine sign the native peoples needed for strength; the Virgin did not appear to the Spanish conquerors, but to a humble Indian and she spoke in his native language.

Whether legend or true, the story is a unique and beloved artifact of Mexican culture. It was not made to be usurped by the next wave of conquerors, the Americans, making themselves into holy people for patching up the unholy mess their own government made in an entirely different country.

As to the four dead women -- especially the allegedly virginal pasty, pudgy business administration student by the name of Jean Donovan -- pity more didn't meet a similar fate.

Maybe if more American "holy" women had been tortured, raped and murdered, the 75,000 ordinary Salvadorans similarly killed until the peace pact of 1992 -- by which time "anti-Communist" military repression had lost the last shred of justification, if it ever had any -- might have continued their obscure, and to American eyes insignificant, little lives.

Pound foolish about welfare fraud

A new year's clean slate and little happening forces the journalist to end up burrowing through piles of audits to find news. Here's my perennial beef about almost all of the investigating: it's all focused on penny-ante small-time pilfering by individuals, not the big money corporate ripoffs.

An appointee steers contracts to favored consulting firms? The fine tooth comb is used to qualify everything until the misdeed is found either negligible or not subject to proof.

But let someone, usually someone none too smart, chisel a dime here or there to feed his or her family and the Marines get called in. There was even a Republican president who lied and slandered and racially stereotyped people with a claim about an alleged "welfare queen" that turned out to be false.

We could give away public assistance to everyone who said they needed it (frankly, it's not much to begin with), without verifying their papers and we'd save tons on paperwork and bureaucracy, to which a substantial portion of the money goes.

All told the real and significant corruption is corporate, not individual.They get contracts for millions for services they perform poorly, at very low cost or not at all. In contrast, the average individual gets, at most, a below-poverty income. Time to refocus accountability on the private sector's use of the public dime.

45 Days without Money

If you have ever gone without any income or benefits for 45 days, welcome to the world of roughly 2,138,000 Americans this week. What crime did they commit? They had the effrontery of not being able to find a job before June 2, 2010, when Congress allowed extended unemployment benefits to expire.

"Oh, extended" you say? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 6.8 million unemployed Americans have lacked a job for more than six months. That's 46% of out-of-work Americans, which is an all-time historical high (a detailed study on this is available from the National Employment Law Project here).

Now, of course, not all of them will lose benefits right now. But keep in mind that federal extended benefits had provided up 99 weeks (close to two years) of benefits in some states.

That sound too long? Republicans thinks so: they say the benefits are keeping people from looking for a job, which is ridiculous since the last national unemployment figure shrank to 9.5 percent only because people left the workforce in huge numbers. They were discouraged just before Congress cut them off.

Now they're just plain desperate.

The Poor Tax

Why is it that almost every day I am reminded of the Great Depression, in particular the Parker Brothers Monopoly game and its "Poor Tax" card? By taxes, I mean the endless stream of corporate scams on the poorest, least educated people.

If you pay attention at what's promoted you'll find come-ons to

• call toll-free for "easy money" ... just sign over your car and pay interest forever
• get help with bankruptcy, foreclosure, the IRS ... from "fixers"
• ask a pharmaceutical or medical supply company ... to bilk Medicaid for you

The latest I've come across, courtesy of Paychex, Chase Visa and your friendly employer, is the application for a Chase Pay Card Plus. Here's the come-on:

"Instead of waiting in line to cash your paycheck, have your pay automatically deposited to a Chase Pay Card Plus account." Sure ...

• if you pay $1.50 to $3.00 per automated teller machine withdrawal, 
• $1.00 to $3.00 to find out your balance, 
• $5.00 for over-the-counter withdrawals (after your four "free" ones)
• $12 for a check to close your account
• $3 a month for "inactivity"

... and hey, you can get the card delivered to you extra fast for only $24.75 !!!!

They will allow you FREE point-of-sale transactions (they filch from the merchants, instead).

But wait ... what's this about "3.5% per international conversion rate transaction"?

This is targeted to immigrants (who else would regularly need international remittances?), in addition to the welfare mother waitress with three minimum-wage jobs living in a motel and dreaming of Aruba. The "unbanked."

Did the banks discover the low-income worker "market" while bilking states that "privatized" and "automated" their public assistance programs at the behest of the Bushies? You betcha.

There's a sucker born every day in America -- and it isn't the JPirateMorgan Chase Bank.

"Why should I pay for you when you get sick?"

The heading of this post* is the summation of all objections to any public social insurance program, be it unemployment compensation, social security, day care supports, family leave and even education. Now that the congressional debate over health insurance reform has ended, perhaps we ought to ask, why indeed should I pay for you?

The first answer, of course, is that if a law says I must pay for you, surely it also means you must pay for me. That's what social insurance means, joining forces as a society to share the essential risks and challenges in human life, such as illness, unemployment, bearing and rearing children, acquiring necessary knowledge and old age.

They've been doing that for 60 years or more in the part of Europe that was never Communist.

Secondly, and seldom acknowledged, because someone has already paid for you. When you were 3 years old, say, even if you were born wealthy on paper, were you handling your investments, let alone buying and preparing all the food you ate, the clothing you wore, the housing you had? Weren't you a net recipient of everything until, at a minimum, your adolescence?

If you started your own business, did you build the transportation infrastructure that allows you to ship goods to customers? If you are now retired, do you think for a moment that you contributed every last penny that is being spent on you while you produce nothing at all?

There are no utterly self-sufficient individuals. Not even you. That's why you should pay for me when I get sick, in fairness, to make up for my paying for you when you get sick.

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* A phrase stolen from Kel, the blogger of the Osterley Times.

Piling on Muslims

At the risk of sticking my nose where it doesn't belong, I would like to raise my voice against the denial of French citizenship to a man accused of forcing his wife to wear a veil. According to The New York Times and Le Monde, Prime Minister François Fillon announced on Feb. 3 that he would sign a decree denying French nationality to the man.

We don't know the man's name nor the evidence that he forced his wife to wear a veil. Nor do we know under what law it is illegal to do so. Most importantly, we don't know how the man allegedly forced his wife to wear a veil.

Just think. How does one person force another person to wear something? Did he tie her down and put it on her? Did he watch her every moment to make sure she didn't take it off? Did he beat her and terrorize her?

If the alleged forcing involved assault it is some kind of crime in France, no? Why wasn't he arrested? Why wasn't he deported? How come he is allowed to walk freely and merely denied the "honor" of a French passport?

And don't they have shelters for battered women in France to which she could have fled and been helped to remake her life without the abusive husband?

Given the absence of evidence, why does this allegation warrant a prejudicial, but merely administrative, government action? Why isn't the citizenry of the country that gave us the cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" rising up in outrage against an arbitrary government that denies citizen to a man without showing legal cause?

Who's next? Jews for wearing yarmulkes? Americans for wearing shorts in summer? Peruvians for wearing ponchos?

All I see here is a Muslim couple in which the woman apparently happens to wear a veil.

Disparity

Someone who knows that I follow U.S. policy on poverty and unemployment asked me for a number that is not those typically reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: What proportion of the unemployed are African American?

The answer is not as simple as looking up a ready made official figure.

In June, the African-American labor force totaled 16 million, or 57.8 percent of the total African-American civilian, noninstitutional population (27.8 million). I offer these figures to highlight that "labor force" essentially means civilians out of jail who are able and willing to work.

Of that group, 1.6 million people were unemployed (for a 9.2 percent unemployment rate, compared 4.9 percent for whites). See this Bureau of Labor Statistics table.

Now, in response to the question, the total number of people unemployed in June was 8.4 million (see this other table). Thus, that the 1.6 million who were black represented about 19 percent of all unemployed.

Let's put this in context.

The 37,051,483 people who are black are roughly 12.3 percent of the total population of 299,398,485 (see these 2006 Census Bureau figures). Given that they make up 19 percent of the unemployed, blacks are overrepresented among the unemployed and roughly 1.5 times more likely to be unemployed than the overall population.

Le Socialisme Americain

When I picked up my newspaper yesterday, I thought I woke up in France. But no, it turns out socialism is alive and well in America.

-- Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky) at the Senate Banking Committee

Heavens, no! Not socialism! Not a yearly month-long vacation for everyone, a 35-hour work week and freedom from worry about affording health care or old age. Can't have that!

Bunning's remark on Wednesday concerning the possible bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was, ostensibly, hyperbole. Yet it reflects the tenacious grip on a refusal among many Americans to be rational about any idea that might be even timidly left of center.

Many people, including a correspondent of mine, assume that the minute one criticizes the richly flawed system of capitalism, one is advocating the Gulag Soviet prison system with Joe Stalin on top. The ghost of Joe McCarthy seemingly inhabits a good share of the American psyche: anything even suggestively pinko, lefty, Commie is totalitarian trash and utterly unthinkable.

Yet not just France has dabbled quite nicely in socialism, without Gulag, without bread lines. Britain, Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and Sweden have all had substantively socialist governments that have put in place a system of womb-to-tomb state-supported social and economic insurance.

Even capitalist Canada has socialized medicine; I've tried it and it's good.

Only the United States insists on the archaic avoirdupoids system of weights and measures to go along with its antiquated dog-eat-dog economics.

Yet, if you're wealthy or a corporation, there's U.S. socialism for you in the form of gargantuan subsidies. Why not capitalism for them, Mr. Bunning? Or, indeed, why not socialism for wage earners and those unlucky enough not to earn wages at all?

Argentina's "Farmers" Are Not Exactly Old MacDonald

Despite a 30-day "truce" in their "strike" involving roadblocks around the country, the "farmers" of Argentina have decided not to deny their fellow-citizens their daily beef -- not that they've ceased airing their own absurd and unpalatable beefs. Witness an open letter to President Cristina Fernández de Kirschner being circulated on the Internet by the daughter of one such "farmer."

In part, one Victoria Guazzone di Passalacqua, 22, from the town of Azul, province of Buenos Aires (about 150 miles south of the nation's capital, Buenos Aires), writes the following:

I am the daughter of an agricultural producer who has worked like a horse all his on the countryside. I am a daughter of a father who, to this day, rises every morning at 6 to be the first to go and talk to the peons working in the paddocks. I am a daughter of a father who had to go and live in Azul to be able to give my brothers and me life he wanted for us. I am a daughter of a producer who lost 75% of his crop to the storms last year. I am a daughter of a producer who had to give half the remaining 25% to the government and use the other half deal to pay taxes, in addition to fending for his family's decent living. Despite all this, I am as daughter of the land like any Argentine.

I did not live under the military governments that sickened our country in the 1970s. I do not have missing relatives nor do I have military men in my escutcheon. But I understand that yesterday [reference to a speech by the president, date unknown], instead of continuing to perpetuate the ideological conflicts into which our country plunged more than 30 years ago, it might have been better take inventory of the situation and appease the spirits of everyone. In a history book I once read that "if there is no balance on all the parties involved in a particular chapter of history, justice will be read as revenge" Don't you think, Madam President, that it might be time for you to honor the whip with which you rule on behalf of the interests of all of us and to stop dividing the country into the pitiful dichotomy of the oligarchy and the people?

Only in the Alice-in-Wonderland sociology of the Argentine Republic can one find a landowner's daughter who came of age in the 21st century speaking of her father's farm hands as "peons" (peones in Spanish). Yes, Virginia, it does have the serf-like connotation that you thought it did.

Not only that. Only in such a neo-feudal social structure could the daughter of the landowner, who is obviously not performing his serfs' backbreaking work, no matter how equine his labor, complain that a democratically elected labor-backed president is somehow effecting a social division between "oligarchs" and "people."

Might it not occur to Miss Victoria that any society in which a young woman feels perfectly comfortable referring to her father's employees as "peons" in a public, open letter to her president, already has the social divisions -- nay, canyons -- to which President Cristina Kirchner has merely alluded in response to the landowners absurd and false populism?

To be sure, to any Western eye the 45% levy (up from 35%) on certain agricultural exports will seem a tad high in a country known for its beef, its grains and in more recent years its fine Malbec wines, as well as its leather goods and woolens. But there's a story and a sound purpose behind the tax.

Argentina was once wealthy country (in 1908, its economy was the seventh in the world). Now a quarter of the population lives in poverty -- a proportion brought down from nearly half of the country as recently as 2003, by the policies of Kirchner's predecessor, her husband Nestor. Overwhelmingly, Argentines in the educated class evade personal income taxes massively and park assets overseas.

The levy on exports is one of the few iron-clad mechanisms the government has to raise revenue from wealthy landowners, in order to distribute it through public services to the less fortunate.

Indeed, one of the chief reasons this nation of 40 million overwhelmingly Catholic people of predominantly Spanish and Italian ancestry, whose its capital is at about the latitude of Cape Town, became impoverished was the lack of vision of the traditional landowning class.

From the 1880s through the 1920s, agricultural interests fought tooth and nail to saddle the nascent industrial sector with a taxation that guaranteed that the nation would always sell cattle and buy machinery. At a time when Canada, the United States and Europe were becoming industrial powerhouses, this amounted to national economic suicide.

The industrial entrepreneurs, moreover, took their economic model from the vast estates of the pampas. The greed of the landed elites and the industrialists brought about the revolt of the middle class in the 1920s and the arousal of an immigrant-led labor movement in the 1930s, which was quashed with military rule and fraudulent government through the early 1980s.

Only from 1946 to 1955, under the presidency of a labor-minded general of corporatist leanings, Juan Domingo Perón, did most of the social and economic advances we take for granted take place in Argentina: the women's right to vote, the 8-hour workday, the abolition of child labor and so on.

Cristina and Nestor Kirschner are modern, social democratic heirs of the Peronist tradition. In Argentina's political economy, the "farmers" who are "striking" really are the oligarchy (the ruling elite, from the Greek oligon, the few, and arko, rule), the few who live off the fat of the very rich, bountiful land worked upon by the underpaid and underworked peones.

Kirschner is no doubt far from perfect. Conversely, the landowners are probably not all wishing the generals would come back to torture la chusma, the rabble, into submission, as Kirschner has suggested -- but I'd wager that more than a few wouldn't mind a seeing some military boots goose-stepping once again.

No-Cojones Congress

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (P-Calif.) perpetuates the myth that women are terrible at math: she can't count noses in the House of Representatives, where Democrats have a comfortable -- let's spell it -- m-a-j-o-r-i-t-y. That's why she handed Sen. Harry Reid (P-Nev.) a "stimulus" bill that smelled like three-day-old fish left in the sun because it does nothing for the unemployed, who could do the most for the economy.

The "P" in the identification tags is not a mistake: it stands for Pseudo-Democrats. As in showing every sign of being outside what one presidential candidate called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." That's the wing that puts workers and general well-being first.

Pelosi blew it by inexplicably failing to stop the House Republicans, who are in the minority (Nancy, check the House roll, will ya?), from constructing a monstruosity of a tax-rebate and business tax-cut bill. Reid failed by caving in and accepting Pelosi's stupid done deal with only a token gesture for the elderly and veterans.

Bad policy and terrible politics. This legislative work lacks what in very colloquial Spanish is called cojones (balls).

In the face of a recession, the most stimulative disbursements would be in the form of money going to people with the least disposable income -- that is, people for whom a dollar in hand is a means to fulfilling an immediate need by spending the dough. These are the folks most likely to generate consumer demand and boost the economy.

Giving money to wealthier people risks having the funds go into savings or investments with little or no demand effect at all.

An early appraisal of the principles for an economic stimulus, prepared before Pelosi even had a bill to deal with, two major economic analysts were cited as specifically locating the highest stimulative effect in expenditures such as unemployment compensation and food stamps.

Economist Mark Zandi is quoted as demonstrating that for every dollar spent in the form of unemployment checks, the economy receives an economic consumer demand boost of $1.73. In contrast, the Republicans' much-vaunted increase in tax breaks for small business investment would yield only 25¢.

The Republicans, along with Pelosi and Reid, chose a 25¢ stimulus over a $1.73 boost. Oh, yes, and a lot of pandering in an election year to folks to whom $300 won't mean very much. Certainly not more than it did in early 2001. Remember the Bush rebate (and the recession that followed it)?

One might accept that Reid, who was blocked by a single vote in a very tightly divided Senate couldn't do otherwise. But what's Pelosi's excuse? Democrats have a comfortable, if not veto-proof, majority in the House. Doesn't Pelosi know that when you have a majority you can get things you want done?

What do I hear? Bush would have vetoed help for the neediest citizens that would help all of us the most? I would have replied "Make our day, Georgie! Let's make sure every American hears that the leader of the Republican Party would rather give money to the richest taxpayers than fight recession by aiding those who will spend the cash assistance."

Now Bush can say that the Dems are in the pockets of the rich just about as much as the Repubs.

And the unemployed? The poor? They don't count to either one.

On Contributing to Poverty

"How did the United States contribute to the poverty in Latin America?" asks commenter and fellow-blogger Jen. The drum roll of military interventions and roster of investment companies and list of rebels killed springs to mind, but that is not her question. She asks something well worth pondering that doesn't often get addressed: how have we, collectively and individually contributed to poverty outside our immediate context?

Indeed, how does anyone contribute to poverty? How have we contributed to poverty around us? The short answer is that most of us who do not hold the major economic and political levers in our hands do so primarily by omission, inaction and neglect.

Things Undone

In the 1928 Book of Common Prayer there was a general confession recited in Morning Prayer that said, in part:

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done;
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done;
And there is no health in us.

The idea is that we all know that we are born into a human society that is morally askew, whatever the reason and however it came to be.

In this sense, while it is true the U.S. did not systematically create poverty in Latin America (or elsewhere), it's a fair question to ask what our country, we collectively, have left "undone" that might have alleviated or diminished poverty.

As someone culturally with one foot in Latin America and one here in the USA, I have long struggled to understand how it was that, say, the United States, Perú, Argentina and Haiti started out more or less at the same starting line about 200 years ago, yet reached vastly different levels of socioeconomic and technological advancement and well-being.

Travel these countries' histories and you'll find a distant European exploration and colonization, with all the attendant tragedies of the meeting of newcomers and inhabitants, the importation of African slaves, the establishment of miniature European political and social structures, an often bloody war of independence, followed by conflicts in nation-building throughout the 19th century.

Compare the USA, Perú, Argentina and Haiti in 1861, when one of my grandfathers was born, and there really wasn't such a huge difference. Sure, DeTocqueville had predicted in 1836 that the United States and Russia would be the major powers of the 20th century, but that was based merely on their land mass and continental expansion.

From Baring Brothers to United Fruit

In 1861, all were agricultural countries in which land tenure had become largely hereditary and oligarchic. Although slavery had been abolished in all but the United States, the agricultural labor regime in all four countries had in common elements of medieval serfdom.

In 1907 it was not yet a sure bet that of the four the United States would become the richest, even though U.S. industrial development far outstripped that of the other three countries, it was early enough in industrialization to allow for a quick sprint by Perú or Argentina -- although probably not tiny Haiti -- to an equal spot. Certainly, Argentina had the resources.

One missing piece in this history is neocolonialism, the system by which one country controls another through economic, rather than political or military means. Early in the 19th century, George Canning, British under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, wrote that South America, freed from political bondage to Spain, would be "in our thrall" provided Britain managed its business with the new republics well.

Without firing a shot, British railroads and banks positioned their nation in a controlling role in many South American countries. In Central America, the British model began to be attempted by U.S. companies such as the infamous United Fruit Company (since 1984 Chiquita Brands International Inc.), which arranged the election and deposition of countless governments, along with multiple U.S. military interventions.

Still, some ask, how come foreign investment in the United States didn't wreak the havoc that it did in Latin America? The short answer is that, first of all, it did: the hated railroad men who spawned countless popular outlaws in the U.S. West worked for British and European investors. (Just wait until foreigners start dumping their U.S.-denominated investments -- coming soon to a financial market near you -- and see how you like foreign investors.)

Indeed, my grandfather participated in an 1890 popular uprising in Argentina to stop the government from paying what were deemed exorbitant interest fees to the Baring Brothers & Co. (now Barings Bank), which then went into its first bankruptcy, causing a European continent-wide financial panic. My father burned Union Jacks in the 1930s. (Of course, then I did them both the dishonor of being born in the United States, heir to perfidious Albion.)

The U.S. pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere does not date back to 1823, when President James Monroe first claimed that "as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers." The United States lacked the power to enforce the position -- and did not try in the most egregious and obvious example, Canada.

Bully

The real change was brought about by the Spanish-American war and the "hero" of San Juan Hill, Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1904 added to Monroe's position the view that

If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.

From this declaration, with loopholes and vagaries large enough to run a truck though them, sprang the bulk of the 150 U.S. military interventions in Latin America. From the 19th century bombardment of Nicaragua by the U.S. Navy for the effrontery of attempting to charge a fee on Cornelius Vanderbilt's yacht to the 20th century occupation by U.S. Marines leading to the execution of one Augusto Nicolás Calderón Sandino in 1934.

In every instance, U.S. troops, spies and influence conveyed not the alleged message of liberty and freedom for all, but the message of the freedom of the wealthy, of their corporate structures and of their local landowning oligarch allies to squeeze the last drop of labor from anyone as they please for as little as possible.

That's how the governments of the United States, my country, contributed to squelch every legitimate claim to human dignity in Latin America (and elsewhere), to support those who would deny the essentials of living to the majority.

And it's not history. In 2002 the Bush Administration attempted to overthrow President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

I won't claim that Chávez or Castro or the Sandinistas have the answer, or even an answer I would advocate. I know many Latin Americans feel the same way.

In fact, every time the United States has intervened, the political space for reasonable and balanced compromises has shrunk, in favor of the extremes of the (usually U.S.-supported) right and left. I explained how and why here. Want moderate answers to come from Latin America? Let's keep the hell out of their politics.

Discerning the path to socioeconomic fairness and prosperity in Latin America is not something to be handled in the boardrooms of Wall Street or the situation rooms of the White House or the Pentagon. It's something that, left to their own devices, Latin Americans are perfectly capable of figuring out on their own.

United States of Brazil

The title of this essay was, in fact, the original legal name of the Estados Unidos do Brasil, just as Mexico is legally the Mexican United States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos). What I mean is not to evoke these countries but to suggest the general drift of the historical and socioeconomic current propelling the nation we know as the United States of America. We are slouching toward Brazil, or worse, Bolivia.

These are double-edged, complicated ideas for me. I have visited relatives in Brazil many times, counted among my personal acquaintances and friends a number of Bolivians, including one president. To me, these countries are not distant, abstract instances of Latin American stupidity or laziness or [throw in your pejorative here].

Rather, they are expressions of what Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano called "el continente de despojo" (the continent of dispossession) in his famous work Open Veins of Latin America, which recounts the sad, sad tale of my parents' ancestral society in a continental context.

"Latin America," like "Hispanic," is an abstraction as seen from outside the reality. There is a common historical, linguistic, religious and to some extent ethnic heritage uniting the score of nations south of the Rio Grande. However, Latin Americans think of themselves as nationals of a country before they think of themselves as citizens of "la patria grande" (the larger homeland), Hispanic or Latin America.

Where all citizens of the region share an important commonality is in the sense of belonging in the Third World, a place where

• telephones often malfunction (to the point of being a great excuse for not keeping in contact);
• wages of government officials, technicians, and every kind of service worker a middle class person is likely to need, are so low that nothing gets done without greasing a palm;
• middle class status itself is a privilege bestowed on a few, or often enough, a slide down the slippery Maypole of social stratification;
• as few as one or two percent of the population owns and controls the overwhelming majority of the land and productive resources;
• vast majorities live in a crushing, degrading poverty that makes the average U.S. slum look luxurious;
• clear pluralities or majorities do not have regular access to electricity or running water, three meals a day, new clothes, an actual formal building for shelter or regular employment, let alone benefits such as health care;
  
• governments, elected and not, are really committees formed by and for the top of society's heap;
• reform has historically been crushed ruthlessly (since 1945, in some countries earlier) with ample U.S. aid and abetting; and
  
• on and on and on ...

I have to stop to stop myself from becoming a crashing bore or become so angry I cannot write any more.

My point is that the Third World conditions that exist in Latin America are, in general, way below what most Americans would deem a normal part of life. Even so, Latin America offers among the best of the conditions affecting the four-fifths of humanity to which no one who is reading this even remotely belongs.

The keen observer will have noted already that many of these conditions are no longer entirely foreign to the United States, as they largely were during the second half of the 20th century. Our country is a place where:

• telephones began to become erratic since the breakup of Ma Bell;
• the average, inflation-adjusted wage in 2006 was 22 percent below that of 1973;
• the middle class is stagnating, as indicated by declining median household incomes for the five years of this century;
  
• unemployment duration is becoming lengthier and the safety net for those who slip out of the middle class are frayed to nonexistent;
• the top 20 percent of households ($92,032 a year or higher) took home 51 percent of all income, while the bottom 20 percent ($20,035 annually or less) took home about 3.4 percent (2006 figures) -- and that's just income, on the wealth side, the top 1 percent of households owned 33.4 percent of all privately held wealth, with the next 19 percent owned 51 percent -- thus, the wealthiest 20 percent of the people owned 84 percent of all private property, leaving only 16 percent for the rest (2001 figures);
• the increasing proportion of poor households in the USA experience food insecurity, lack of or spotty access to health care, inability to pay bills such as rent and other essentials, substandard housing, irregular employment, law wages, lack of career advancement prospects, poor education and more;
• the current government came to power against the wishes of the majority in the year 2001 and has ruled to benefit a tiny, tiny elite; and
  
• ask the Wobblies, the Molly Maguires, Sacco and Vanzetti and the Black Panthers if U.S. political repression is harsh, or ask the blacklisted people during McCarthyism, or those lynched in the 1930s ...

What disturbs me is not so much the U.S. reality, which has always meant that each social advance in our history is soaked in blood, but that the trend is now downsliding.

The poor are becoming poorer, the rich richer, the middle class is dwindling. With that comes a deterioration of an admittedly charmed style of life.

The telephones are bad? I just read about a lady of 75 in Virginia who went to the telephone company's offices with a hammer and started smashing computers after being utterly unable to get the attention of "customer service" staff for 3 months when her phone was mistakenly cut off. She's in jail when the telephone company executives who cut everything to the bone should be in irons.

They do it because investors demand profits? The investors' greed should be limited. By the government that shouldn't be in the pockets of the highest bidder.

Let things slide, work off frustrations with Comedy Central or the Fox network's over-the-top cartoon humor shows, chill ... and by the time you take a good look, there will be Brazilian favelas in New York, you will have to bribe the cable man, that is ... if you still have a respectable job with rapidly vanishing health insurance and pension benefits.

Don't think it can't happen. In 1907, Argentina had the 7th economy in the world. "Rich as an Argentine" was a popular phrase in the United States, which was not yet the towering, all-powerful and super-rich nation we have known since 1945.

There is nothing divinely ordained about U.S. wealth or institutions that attempt to achieve greater socioeconomic equality. Both are severely at risk.

It is likely that, much as the 20th century was aptly dubbed "the American century" by Walter Lippmann, the 21st may be the Chinese century or -- my guess -- the European century. Very little can be done about that. What goes up, must come down.

Absent social and political forces to level not just the playing field but to some extent the scores of the game, however, the United States shows all the earmarks of drifting toward a Third World social structure. This need not happen.

When European nations lost their pre-eminence and vast colonial empires starting in 1945, they introduced the most generous "cradle to grave" systems of social insurance ever known in history. Some may need their sails trimmed a bit, but on the whole, these are viable and necessary systems that the USA, as an advanced nation, should have.

Else, welcome to Brazil.

What Makes Pedophiles Look Good

The title is not a riddle, but perhaps it should be. The Buenos Aires Herald reports the sentencing to life imprisonment of a Catholic priest charged with participating, under the guise of providing spiritual assistance, in the torture and murder of prisoners during the 1976-83 Argentine military dictatorship that kidnapped an estimated 30,000 people.

As with U.S. pedophile priests, I had heard for years that there was muck in the ranks of the Argentine Catholic clergy that would one day come to light. No one who spent as many years as I have reading the Catholic hierarchy's tea leaves and observing the peculiar sociology of Argentina could have remained oblivious to the obvious existence for generations of "funny" priests and fascists in Roman collar.

My wonder is that it has taken so long for the first of the Argentine latter to find himself in richly deserved prison.

My astonishment is compounded by the operetta name worthy of The Producers of convicted priest Christian Federico von Wernich, whom I almost expect to leap up into a high-kicking stage parade to the tune of "Springtime for Hitler in Germany." I couldn't have made him up if I had tried.

That he is not being executed is a tribute to the absence of a capital penalty in Argentina -- a legal nicety that did not deter the military goons of the last dictatorship.

Time in prison will afford the former police chaplain the solitude needed to confront the heinous nature of his deeds.

Von Wernich approached him and, standing up, offered his left hand. The prisoner took it with his two hands and clung to it, pleading: “Father, Father, please, I do not want to die, I do not want to die.” The priest watched him with a mix of pity and disdain, and soon enough he offered a solution: "Son, you know that the lives of the men who are inside here depend on God and the cooperation they can offer. If you want to continue living, you already know what you have to do."

-- my translation of an extract from Maldito Tú Eres: Iglesia y Represión Ilegal (Cursed Thou Art: Church and Illegal Repression) by Hernán Brienza

The testimony of tens of survivors from the clandestine detention centers set up by the military regime certainly has not chastened the priest's lawyer, Juan Martín Cerolini, who told La Nación that: "There's disparity in the treatment of the victims who died unjustly in the 1970s. There's a closeness to one sector, which is subsidized, financed and placed in public office, while toward the other victims there is neither warmth nor concern. Each time that there has been a public act of remembrance of those killed by subversion they have been minimized."

He added: "We're not fatuous. We recognize that tortures, kidnappings and murders in that terrible time were committed in the name of the State, but we cannot accept the application of cosmetics to the past. That's not history but propaganda, just like what the Nazis disseminated."

Of course, where would we be without an application of Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies? To boot, by the party most analogous to dear old Adolf's cronies.

Somewhat greater circumspection has come from Von Wernich's bishop, who asked vaguely for forgiveness and even suggested that some canonical action might be taken. Don't hold your breath on even that loophole-riddled pseudo-promise.

Surprised? Von Wernich is still technically a priest in good standing.

Given that the Vatican is hiding the chief child-rapist hider from Boston, one Bernard Cardinal Law, from the reach of U.S. law, what chance is there that they're going to throw out a priest who helped anti-Communists, no matter how murderously? I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn for those who expect decency from the Catholic hierarchy.

What makes pedophiles look good? Father Christian Federico von Wernich.

What Is To Be Done?

With this title, given to a pamphlet on revolutionary strategy by Vladimir Ilych Lenin, memo writers everywhere (notably me) have amused their peers in multiple ways. In this instance I am using the title to respond to a question posed in response to my post Why Don't We Solve Problems.

Jen, you surely recall, asked "if caring for each other is the answer, what do we do next collectively?"

Did I want to call everyone to the ramparts? Would anyone come if I did? It seemed an awesome responsibility. So I dithered until, in the course of my meandering through Wonkland I came across a few ideas that make sense to me.

1. Change the Words We Use and the Way We Speak

Somebody reading this surely remembers how, after the 1968 riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the term "busboy" disappeared from everyday speech in Washington. While downtown buildings were still smoldering, nobody wanted to be caught dead calling a waiter's assistant "boy," especially since most of them were black for reasons that I think need no explanation.

Similarly, do we have any takers for calling Hillary Clinton a "girl"?

Those two changes alone have not made African Americans suddenly privileged nor created a matriarchy, but they have caused people to rethink the notion of diminutives for people whose socioeconomic stature has been forcibly small.

In a similar way, it's been suggested that the way we talk about poverty -- even the term "poverty" -- focuses attention on the wrong thing. Sympathy for poor people still means thinking of poor people and their problems as something that affects them, not us, when in reality we are all in this together.

Greater poverty means greater crime, poorer health and greater inequality for all of us. You and I can become poor. We can be robbed. We can suffer from class distinctions.

Instead of poverty, we need to focus on shared prosperity. The Economic Policy Institute is devoting a series of events to developing a policy agenda about it. Shared prosperity involves better wages for all. It's about food, clothing, shelter, jobs, education and health. For everyone, in a measure that allows everyone to live a life all of us can recognize as dignified.

2. Unify to Retake Our Democracy

Today I happen to have gone to hear economist Robert Reich, secretary of labor from 1993 to 1997, make an earnest appeal to activists to stop focusing on our parochial issues, no matter how important and valid, and to unite into the grand task of retaking the decision-making processes of our society for all citizens, not just Gucci-wearing lobbyists and campaign contributors. Reich, who makes a point of bringing up his diminutive height (4 ft 10.5 in) whenever he speaks or writes, is a giant when it comes to making sense.

We can't let them (and we all know who they are) pit women against blacks and Hispanics, homeless against homeowners, limousine liberals against bus-line activists.

There will be no shelters built unless we stop burning money in Iraq. No schools built unless we raise the wealthiest people's marginal tax rate from somewhere between 15% and 35% to something closer to the 76% to 91% it was under presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower -- neither of whom were wild-eyed radicals.

Everything has to be done together, organically, with everyone pitching in the areas they can help best.

3. Participate in Healthy Criticism of the Leadership

Whether it's President H. Clinton or President Obama, the next, hopefully Democratic, president will not be infallible.

Clinton brings in tow a circle of seasoned, extremely bright people whose conversation sets the mind of anyone listening to them on fire. They can take complex problems and recast them simply, surgically slicing the Gordian Knots of policy.

But they are also a tad over-confident and last time they didn't do so well.

Obama is unquestionably inexperienced, although he has something akin to the JFK charisma on his side. Let's not forget what happened to JFK. Obama is not the only pre-primary presidential candidate to get Secret Service protection for nothing. There are a lot of hate-filled people in the US of A.

Can Obama make the spark he brings set off our imaginations for good? What if the unthinkable happens?

In either case, the next president should not get a pass merely because he or she is a Blue-State president. Democratic administrations have screwed the unions, have forgotten the Mexican-American votes they solicited and have even started stupid foreign wars.

We have to all participate in holding our truly elected leaders' feet to the fire. Make them fulfill their promises. Elect more radical folks to Congress -- instead of Republicans -- if the liberals can't get the job done.

We always live in crisis because we are always growing, progressing in our lives until we die. The next few years, for our society, could be defining moments.

Will we unite to put in policies that save the environment from catastrophe, allow a generation to retire without unduly burdening those that follow, fulfill some of the basic promises of the American Dream for all of us, behave in the world in a manner somewhat gentler than a gorilla despite our 900 lbs.?

You and I have the answer. Don't mourn me, Joe Hill said, get out and organize.

Women Working

In another blog, the writer attempts to smooth the feathers ruffles in a debate sparked by one mother's take on how candidate John Edwards' family should handle parenting in the middle of a presidential campaign. The mother took a shot at Elizabeth Edwards (why not at John?) on the basis of the soundbite of her husband chiding their boy Jack -- the spank heard around the world.

Chani tiptoes into that debate proclaiming that she has never been a mother. I, too, have never been a mother, yet I am interested in and would like to say a few things about this.

Should women work?

That's the way the question was phrased before 1970, the year Sisterhood Is Powerful was first published. The presumption was that when women stay home to raise children and keep house they are not working. After all, in that context, the man came home with the paycheck.

Things changed. A little. Then a bit more.

In the Boomer generation women became lawyers and doctors and engineers and linepeople and mail carriers and miners in proportions never seen before. My sneaking suspicion, however, was that U.S. American women gained the lifestyle of the Soviet woman, who essentially had become an cash income-winner in the labor market on top of her traditional work as mother and housewife.

The mass entry of women into the labor market in the United States coincides with the beginning of a period of wage stagnation that has not yet ended. From 1973 to 2003, average U.S. wages declined by about a fifth.

Do these two events correlate perfectly and exclusively to the point that one can draw a line of causation from one to the other? Not that I know of, but the parallel is striking.

To a certain extent, I would conclude, Boomer women were taken for a ride.

Chani was smart not to go for it and decline motherhood. In my case, my now-estranged spouse chose to stay home and be an excellent mother; I think my sons are better people for it. But the path of both these women need not be the best one. It was the path chosen by women lucky enough to have the choice.

Despite the enhanced intellectual and psychological gratification of participating in the labor force, especially in a culture so devoted to the notion of work for pay, Boomer women for the most part were offered bad choices. Men on the job could turn off the home and the children; in my experience, women have not been able to and, frankly, I wonder whether they should have had to try.

We Boomers did not resolve the issues that arose out of the question we raised: Since women do work, why shouldn't they get paid, get degrees and prestige and so on, just like men?

The Generation X families and couples I have known seem to have begun the task of digging deeper. In some, the principal breadwinner is the woman and the principal nurturer, cook and household keeper is the man. Or they try shifting balances of work and family duties, since men have not found a way to undergo pregnancy or breastfeed. Not yet, anyway.

Of course, the men were born well after the precepts of Second Wave Feminism had seeped into every burrow of society.

The fly in the ointment was the twofold whammy introduced by the Reagan Era.

Social neoconservatism has been attempting -- so far with mixed results -- to bring women back to the famous three Ks of yore, kinder, küche, kirche (children, kitchen and church). Economic neoconservatism has fairly successfully generated a yawning divide between the wealthiest 20 percent (household income of more than $97,000) and the rest of Americans.

Worse still, Newton Leroy Gingrich's version of welfare reform, which triumphed in 1996 on the shoulders of both conservatisms I have mentioned, suddenly threw out the window the notion that mothering during early childhood -- let's say from birth to kindergarten or first grade -- is a socially worthwhile contribution deserving public assistance if the household has no other means of support.

Initially, poor mothers with children under six were exempt from work, then states began to ratchet that age down until now it has become more or less the national policy that poor women give birth and go back to their low-wage dead-end job lickety split -- or else.

I like to cite to the conservatives who are proud of compelling these women back to the workplace that no less than that wild-eyed liberal from Spain, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, instituted a policy in the 1950s whereby the state paid stay-at-home mothers a monthly stipend. The sum was only a few hundred pesetas (a few U.S. dollars today, worth somewhat more then, but never a lot of money), thus largely symbolic.

Still, when has U.S. society ever recognized or assigned any economic value to mothering at home?

My point is not that all women should stay at home, nor that all should go hold a job. My view is that the choice should be a reasonable option between two more or less equitable possibilities. It isn't yet, although we are making strides toward that goal.

In the meantime, it never ceases to amaze me that women would put as much energy berating one of their own, instead of uniting to get the necessary changes done.

Portal for Billionaires

While you are fretting about what happened to your savings this past month, with the Dow roller coaster, the high rollers are getting their own private playground, according to the one U.S. business news scoop I have ever seen the Washington Post get. It's called the NASDAQ Portal and it's for investors with at least $100 million to pony up; if you think that doesn't mean you, think again, your pension or mutual fund may be invested there.

This sort of thing affects all of us in more ways than one.

Starting August 15 NASDAQ has been offering certain investors, including "qualified institutional investors" under Securities and Exchange Commission rule 144A, the opportunity to buy and sell stock, commercial paper and other instruments without having to disclose the purchasers, the financial statements of the firms involved or of the investors.

Shhh ... it's a private club.

Combine that with the acquisition of Chrysler -- soon other major companies -- by an investor group in such away that it is now a private company. Let's forget all the tax dollars that went into saving Chrysler in the first place; when the taxpayer invests, it doesn't count. (Remember the Tom Paxton song I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler?)

Chrysler is only the first of several offerings of a similar sort, creating a corporate financing gated community of sorts, to which most people are not allowed entrance, even though they are affected as employees, consumers and taxpayers.

All right, I won't deny that current disclosures are almost meaningless. Nor that most balance sheets and profit-and-loss statements, while technically accurate in a murky sort of way, might as well have been written by the Brontë sisters.

The various investment markets are, for the most part, legalized gambling. Still, those few laws from the New Deal era that survived Reagan and the two Bushes, plus the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley rules, help catch the occasional egregious crook.

With the abandonment of any pretense that there is an insider elite that cooks the books and holds all the economic power, we are nakedly no longer living in a society of laws.

To put it in Dickensian terms, the law is an ass; but if you have enough money it doesn't exist at all.

Why Don't We Solve Problems?

Feeling discomfort, fellow citizens? Do you feel a mild pain in the Congress and bloating in the White House despite unappeased hunger for competence and forthright leaders? Does the news cause belching, nausea or heartburn? You need a therapy with a low risk of sexual side effects.

In a recent post my fellow blogger Jen asked "What does keeping people homeless do for our country? What benefits exist by choosing to allow this to continue?" The same could be asked about every pressing social and economic need -- there are many and deepening since this century began.

Jen spoke from a ground-level on-the-front perspective I don't have. I was drawn in by her comment that she and her colleagues work tirelessly to help the homeless and "one day we pull our head out of our asses and wonder what has happened, why no difference has been made." Her head, in my opinion, has been in a much more savory place than she believes.

The problem is that there's always a dichotomy between doing and policymaking. My perspective as an active observer of the policymaking process is very different. While I know someone who knows many of the homeless people in my city by name, I prefer to deal with homelessness by reporting on policy and its undergirding.

So here's the wonk wannabe short answer to Jen's question: homelessness, the millions who have no access to preventive health care, the millions more who are getting a deficient education, the millions who are losing jobs to India and China and so on, all of it, is part and parcel of the way we do things in this and other countries -- in brief, the system.

Homelessness was huge in the 1930s, retreated in the 1940s through the 1960s, began to climb as a counter-cultural phenomenon and a side-effect of Vietnam (ever notice how many are [black] veterans?) and became ubiquitous again when Ronald Reagan essentially gutted the public mental health system.

Much the same cycle can be seen with respect to manufacturing and other well-paying jobs and the state of education. In the matter of health, Harry Truman proposed a plan that would have put us on a par with Britain's excellent system of socialized medicine (I lived there), but the American Medical Association and the pharma industry blocked it.

In the 1920s we had an excellent clean, non-polluting system of electrified rail transport in many large cities. General Motors bought out the transit systems and transformed them into a diesel-guzzling combustion-engine only, second-class transport for the poorest. Now you can swim on the polar ice cap.

The top 1 percent of our socioeconomic ladder, which starts at a lower dollar figure than most educated people think (download this), control well over half of the nation's assets (this is wealth, not just income). They are in a position to make the vital decisions; if anyone benefits from the present state of affairs, they do -- and since George W. Bush seized power, they have, beyond belief.

What's the problem? We have a formalized civil and political democracy, but we completely lack democracy in the economy.

Unless you work in a union shop, you essentially work in a dictatorship in which whoever owns or runs the workplace can essentially control your life for whatever portion of your time you are selling. Similarly, unless you are a millionaire (what am I saying ... a billionaire!) and you can afford to buy votes in Congress, the voice your vote gives you is probably about a tenth of its relative demographic weight, which is small enough already.

What do the powers that be gain from homelessness? Very little, directly. But indirectly every homeless person is a walking advertisement for what can happen to you if you choose to rebel at the workplace or the ballot booth.

The system runs on the anxiety that if you do not keep your place on the rat-race treadmill, you will fall behind. Moreover, the pace of demands -- or speed of the treadmill -- increases all the time; they keep convincing you to buy homes, cars, iPhones that we simply "must" have. If you stumble or -- heavens forfend! -- fall, it's your fault and you don't deserve help (see this post).

So the first thing that strikes me as individually actionable is to remain strong, serene and unrattled. Opt out in small ways and eventually you'll manage things that are large. Reconsider the plans you made, the things you thought you needed.

The second thing we can do for this society is to rediscover the meaning and value of solidarity, as a community of purpose and feelings.

In this I am often envious of women, who tend naturally, it seems, to intermingle and support one another in a very altruistic, yet most often practical way. Men are more often lone wolves who live in distrust of one another -- for good reason.

Women in the helping professions -- including human services, Jen -- are often ridiculed by the conservative attempt to suppress altruism in the name of fighting so-called "political correctness." To unstintingly encourage ("good job") and see the positive in other people ("we are all special") may sound cloying to those who would rather think about themselves, but at the heart of it is the key to our collective salvation from the mire of death, war, famine and pollution -- the four horsemen of the false freedom of conservatism.

As Benjamin Franklin warned at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, "We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Thirdly, I think it is necessary for the more wonkish among us to trade places, even on a temporary weekend basis, with the hands-on helping professionals -- and vice versa.

There ought to be some kind of community service requirement for the vast army of political aides and consultants who are behind the politicians -- I would exempt the politicians on grounds that to them it would become a mere photo-op. Aides in Congress who think a tax break will really be meaningful for poor people ought to know some.

Similarly, the doers don't get off scott-free. As a professional observer, I often attend conferences in which people who genuinely do good all year round attempt to discuss the problems and the solutions. The naivete is charming, but no wonder the conservatives have been winning. Folks in the field need to do the occasional congressional internship (a state legislature or city council internship would do) -- or at a policy research and advocacy group -- to see just how many eggs have to be cracked to make policy omelet.

Change takes both study and action.

Recently I attended a meeting at which I found someone who seemed to combine the best of both worlds: meet Minnesota Sen. Tarryl Clark (D-Dist 15), a former executive director of the Minnesota Community Action Partnership, elected to state office in December 2005.

She has experience in nonprofit poverty assistance. When she got into office, instead of grandstanding she went and dusted off a set of socioeconomic goals that had been adopted and promptly shelved -- and she insisted on having the law followed. She's so well liked -- and frankly, impressive -- she was elected majority leader.

Here's a relatively new face to watch: someone who has hands-on experience and shows a keen grasp of policy as well.

The present time is seeing a surge -- to use a phrase in favor at the White House -- of people coming together to challenge the status quo in a comprehensive, coherent and united way -- a surge against everything Bush stands for: more and more of the worst of the worst.

In the final analysis, the best answer for why we don't solve problems is that we don't collectively have the will to do so.

We like our things and the imaginary status they convey. We really think that work redeems us instead of merely being a way to survive and just occasionally express meaning. We really have bought the myth about individuality to the disregard of our essential need for one another.

We need to begin caring for all of us, together.