26 Years, Not 25. The website of the flagship station of the ABC television network, WABC New York, today heads its third top story of the day, "Today marks 25 years since the discovery of AIDS". Not so. That's just another lie about AIDS. Do the math, literally.
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On page 12 of the January 1982 issue of Discover magazine, in the feature "In the News", appears as third item a three-paragraph story titled "Outbreak". It leads off with this key information:

The Centers for Disease Control has reported the outbreak of two rare, serious diseases among homosexual men. In the past year and a half, CDC recorded about 170 cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia and a cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma.

Translation: AIDS began to be noticed a year and a half before January 1982: mid-1980, not mid-1981. So why are we being told it started a year later?
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When I went to the Discover magazine website to see if I could refer readers to an archival copy of that article, I found another matter that has irritated me, the assertions that the great preponderance of native populations of the Americas were wiped out by European diseases. I was thinking only yesterday, "Where are the bones?" Bones last for centuries, and if 90% of the population was wiped out by disease, the remaining population couldn't have buried the bulk of corpses. The entire continent should be strewn with bones, but it's not, is it?
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Well, it turns out that there were plagues of varying sizes abroad in Mexico, but (a) not that killed off 90% of the population and (b) not necessarily of European origin.

If cocolitzli [an Aztec name for a plague they suffered] had been caused by a hemorrhagic virus, [Mexican researcher] Acuña-Soto realized, the Spanish could not have brought it with them. Such diseases do not readily pass from one person to another, so the virus must have been native.

This raised two questions. First, were people prepared to absolve the Spanish of responsibility for one of the great evils of the colonial era? The destruction of ancient Mexico's culture by the Spanish invaders is an integral part of every Mexican's understanding of the country's history. The miseries of the plague years are taken as object lessons in the evils of colonialism. "My grandmother wrote histories, and the terrible things that the Spanish did were always a part of them," says Acuña-Soto. The second question was rooted in science: If the Spanish didn't bring about the cocolitzli, what did?

His answer? Horrendous, extended drought weakened people and concentrated disease-carrying rodents in the same areas as people. When the rains returned, the rodent population exploded, and so did the plague they carried. Could be.
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But the suggestion that the population of Mexico went from 22 million to 2 million in 100 years seems preposterous. There is no comparable drop in population anywhere else on Earth, and human populations have always bounced back from plagues. The Black Death killed, we think, between 1/3 and 1/2 the people of the area from China to Europe that it ravaged, but the populations came back. And as for populations outside Mexico, there is no reason to think any such disease spread throughout the continent. Quite the contrary, where drought did not exist and neither animal nor human populations mixed, there is no reason to think there was any such drastic die-off. Again, where are the bones?
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People believe a lot of things that are just not true — things that make no sense or are just plain false, such as that AIDS appeared 25 years ago, when it actually appeared 26 years ago. Why would media lie? Why would Discover magazine, which has proof in its own pages that the claim is false, not explode the lie? I don't know.
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Discover's website shows archives going back only to 1992. But any major library should have the January 1982 issue, if you'd like to see for yourself that at the bottom of the middle column of page 12 of its January 1982 issue a major American magazine said plainly that AIDS started in mid-1980, not mid-1981, check it out in the library. I don't ask you to trust me. Just trust your own eyes.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,471.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:00 PM

 
Seeing the Trend. Tho most Americans like to think it impossible that the United States could descend into dictatorship, I am not alone in seeing dangerous tendencies becoming more and more open.
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My colleague in Durham, England sent me this email today:

Have you read The Reality of Red-State Fascism by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr? Excerpt:

In 1994, the central state was seen by the bourgeoisie as the main threat to the family; in 2004 it is seen as the main tool for keeping the family together and ensuring its ascendancy. In 1994, the state was seen as the enemy of education; today, the same people view the state as the means of raising standards and purging education of its left-wing influences. In 1994, Christians widely saw that Leviathan was the main enemy of the faith; today, they see Leviathan as the tool by which they will guarantee that their faith will have an impact on the country and the world.

Paul Craig Roberts is right: "In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush." Again: "Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy."

In short, what we have alive in the US is an updated and Americanized fascism. Why fascist? Because it is not leftist in the sense of egalitarian or redistributionist. It has no real beef with business. It doesn't sympathize with the downtrodden, labor, or the poor. It is for all the core institutions of bourgeois life in America: family, faith, and flag. But it sees the state as the central organizing principle of society, views public institutions as the most essential means by which all these institutions are protected and advanced, and adores the head of state as a godlike figure who knows better than anyone else what the country and world[ ] need[ ], and has a special connection to the Creator that permits him to discern the best means to bring it about.

The American right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while adopting an ideology – even without knowing it or being entirely conscious of the change – that is also frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality turns out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept. For a long time, we've tended to see the primary threat to liberty as coming from the left, from the socialists who sought to control the economy from the center. But we must also remember that the sweep of history shows that there are two main dangers to liberty, one that comes from the left and the other that comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced the latter threat, but its reality is only now hitting us fully.

The article quoted above, published December 31, 2004, starts with this paragraph:

Year's end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine. The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.

Republican strategists have been giddy for years over a "permanent Republican majority" that they have cobbled together only by combining groups that are natural enemies: social conservatives and libertarians; fiscal conservatives and rightwing guardians of public morality who are only too happy to spend huge amounts of money to empower the state to crack the whip over nonconformists; plutocrats who adore illegal immigration because it gives them a huge pool of people who will work dirt cheap and put up with all kinds of abuse because if they complain, their employer can have them deported, and nativists who want illegals deported; internationalist Zionists and isolationist superpatriots; uneducated religious fundamentalists and highly educated rationalists. These various unnatural — or should I say "unholy" — alliances are now starting to 'uncobble' the 'permanent Republican majority'.
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Democrats are the natural allies of social libertarians for embracing "diversity" and the traditional American value of tolerance: "live and let live".
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Democrats not merely balanced the budget but actually gave rise to a huge budget surplus under Clinton, enuf to start to pay off the national debt. So fiscal conservatives have to see that Democrats are a better partner. They don't care if the rich are taxed at a higher rate if that's what it takes to balance the budget and pay off the national debt.
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Nativists are a portion of the social-conservative movement. They want the government to be powerful enuf to deport millions of illegal aliens and don't want even temporary guest workers here. That puts them at odds with the plutocrats who want a free flow of cheap labor. Plutocrats want millions of illegals to remain here, in the workforce, even if the price for this present cheap labor pool is the eventual grant of citizenship to those millions — most of whom are then likely to vote Democratic.
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Neocon Zionists are natural allies of radical-right "End Times" fundamentalists, but most of those fundamentalists are also superpatriots, who don't want to see Americans die in foreign wars.
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The college-educated plutocrats who bankroll what Rockwell calls the "kept think tanks" of the 'conservative movement', are embarrassed to tears to be allied with the yahoos they use but despise.
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And the yahoos are perilously close to understanding that they are being used by the rich. There's only so long the plutocrats can keep the poor voting for policies that hurt them by waving "the homosexual agenda" in their face. And what happens if the anti-gay program is actually approved? What will they then wave in the face of the yahoos to keep them voting to keep themselves poor? Foreign wars?
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Adventurism abroad is a time-tested way for leaders to distract their people from domestic problems, but we don't have the masses of disposable underclass soldiers needed to maintain war after war after war, and fiscal conservatives won't stand for the massive outpouring of national treasure and a steeply mounting national debt to pay for such wars.
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Few Americans nowadays really believe in an afterlife. They aren't willing to lay down their one, irreplaceable, immeasurably precious life for causes they don't understand. Wars 7,000 miles and more away just don't have the real, obvious connection to national defense necessary to sustain the superpatriotism that could get yahoos in abundance to risk their lives.
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Creating artificial hardship for the poor by offshore outsourcing and bringing in millions of illegals increases the desperation level for the unskilled. If you then increase pay rates and benefits for the military, you can somewhat increase the pool of people willing to risk death for a better life. But risking death in wars abroad is very different from obeying orders to suspend the Constitution at home, which is the only way Republicans can stay in power much longer.
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It's all falling to pieces for the Republican cabal. They see a permanent Democratic majority unless they do something drastic. If they cannot choke off dissent and intimidate the opposition, the game will soon be over. The only way Republicans can maintain control over government and its levers of power is by a powergrab. Whether that powergrab amounts to actual dictatorship depends upon timing, 'justification', and the blind obedience on the part of the military, FBI, and other instruments of coercion that the cabal is or is not able to command. It's one thing to say "We move at midnite!" It's quite another to get hundreds of thousands of loyal Americans to overturn the Constitution. That doesn't mean the cabal accepts that it cannot make their poster boy, George Bush, into our first President for Life.
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It's all a matter of conditioning, perceived degree of change, and using a "national emergency", real or imagined, to justify drastic measures, on a "temporary" basis that keeps getting extended until it becomes permanent.
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The Bush Administration has taken step after little step to condition Americans to erosion of their rights and acceptance of an all-powerful government needing extraordinary powers to "protect" us. Searches at airports turned into searches at public buildings, and in public transit; prohibition on taking fotografs in public. Then eavesdropping on international fone calls. Then surveillance of domestic fone records. Then a raid upon a Congressman's office and carrying away his files and computer. Next? Searches of anybody on the street, in the home. All the apparatus necessary to prevent people from acting in concert against a dictatorship is being put in place, step by step, one after the other in quick succession.
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Can the Republican cabal manufacture an emergency grave enuf to seize total power and suspend the Constitution "temporarily"? Will soldiers enuf, police enuf, obey orders to impose dictatorship, or will they mutiny and turn their guns against their superiors, to arrest them — or shoot them — for treason?
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We'd like to believe that Americans will not throw away a form of government that has given us freedom and prosperity for over 200 years, but the people who would be given the orders to enforce that rule haven't shared in that prosperity, and without prosperity, who needs freedom?
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Other societies have descended into dictatorship. Are we really immune?
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The answer, in large part, depends upon whether the Constitution and "American way of life" are what the typical soldier or policeman see as "Americanism", or if "patriotism" has become geography-based tribalism, and what matters is not the form of government but the "security" of the tribe. If the Republican cabal can persuade enuf people in the military and police that the Constitution is destroying the Nation, our democracy is doomed.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,465.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:51 PM

 
Hopeless? Is the world getting better or worse? Is it merely changing, but not getting appreciably either better or worse?
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There have been moments in my lifetime when we thought things were finally changing for the better: the defeat of fascism at the end of World War II; the smashing of the Berlin Wall; the enlargement of the European Union to include former Soviet-bloc countries to stabilize democracy there; the death of Mao and trial of the Gang of Four; the end of apartheid in South Africa; the start of NAFTA, signaling the end of Mexico's trying to defy geography and scapegoat the U.S. for all its problems.
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But soon after every such step forward, we took the proverbial two steps back.
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The defeat of Nazism and Japanese militarism produced the triumph of Communism in East Europe and mainland China.
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The reunification of Germany ended the German economic miracle and mired Germany in unemployment and stagnation.
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The European Union has expanded beyond any coherent cultural bounds and become dilute and fractious, even as some leaders delusionally work toward a 'United States of Europe' to replace the U.S. as the world's one superpower, which would entail grave risks in terms of economic, political, cultural, and even military conflict.
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Maoism is gone but not forgotten, and the politics of repression remain entrenched in China. The hoped-for political liberalization and 'inevitable' democratization that prosperity was supposed to bring haven't happened. Worse, the rise of China within WTO-mandated free trade is fundamentally subverting all rich countries around the world, and the Chinese Communists are using vast inpourings of money to build up their military to challenge the U.S. first for regional and then world domination.
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South Africa has descended from a marginal member of the industrial world into a full member of the Third World.
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Irresponsible population growth among Mexico's poor has grossly outstripped economic growth and impelled tens of millions to look to the United States for a better life, further subverting our economic security and putting stark downward pressure on wages and benefits for American workers.
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Everywhere we look, people have managed to screw up every good thing we've accomplished.
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What most people in the West see as the promise of the modern world is viewed as a threat instead to superstitious people in societies all around the planet. Islamists fly into massive violence to hold back the future and return to 'good old days' that were never good enuf. Even in the richest and most modern country on Earth, Christian fundamentalists renounce science, see evil in tolerance, and work to take us, too, back to 'good old days' that were never good for any but the few, 'simpler' times that were hard times that every generation worked to improve or escape.
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Parts of this country are still run as little better than feudal baronies, where one family pretty much runs a town or entire county. That one family loves it that way. But feudalism looks a lot different to the serf than to the lord of the manor.
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In order to return us to illusory 'good old days', rightwingers will slash our civil liberties and institute a moral dictatorship even if that means they have to enact a political dictatorship too. People cannot have the right to choose wrong.
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Democracy isn't a quick fix. The Bushites are trying to make the world safe for Israel by 'promoting freedom' and instituting democracy in all its neighbors, by military force if need be. But the people of Palestine democratically elected Hamas, a sworn enemy of Zionism. Elections in Iran installed a fervent enemy of Israel. Any democratically elected government in any Moslem country anywhere near Israel will be anti-Zionist (as it should be).
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Even here, democracy doesn't really work. Money will prevail more often than fail. And the poor can be manipulated to vote against their own interests, as we see in the South over and over again.
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There are even full-scale assaults on what we thought were the solid, irreversible accomplishments of the New Deal. Centerpiece of that basic change in our way of doing things is Social Security, established almost 70 years ago — but the Radical Right is working mightily to destroy a program that has worked for 70 years!
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"The more things change, the more they stay the same." And the human being of today is in no fundamental way one whit better, smarter, or more enlightened than the human being of 5,000 years ago in the "Cradle of Civilization" (Iraq), Indus Valley, or China. For chrissake, China has still never had a democratically elected government, and Chinese society is still organized around the Confucianist principle that social harmony depends upon everyone accepting their place in a more or less rigid hierarchy. Social mobility is un-Confucian.
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Indeed, most societies to this day are rigidly structured. What your father was, you will be. If you don't accept that, you are a malcontent verging on sociopathic enemy of society. That's a large part of why millions flee Mexico, because they want to live their own dreams, not what society would hold them to. They come here and their ambitions to improve their lives and rise in society threaten to upset the applecart of the old Establishment. The Establishment doesn't want that to happen. The rich want compliant slaves, not people looking out for themselves and aspiring 'beyond their station'. Cheap labor is great for the rich, but not if it comes with aspirations.
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Progress is never secure. We can never be complacent that any achievement is "irreversible". Progressives must always be on guard, and the only way to keep from sliding backward is always to press forward.
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It's not enuf to "fite the good fite". We have to win it. Over and over again.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,464.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:47 PM

 
Resign, Indeed! The attempt by the Bush Administration to turn the United States into a dictatorship continues unabated, tho Americans don't want to believe any such goal is in the minds of the people they elected.
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The Republican Party is split right down the middle by this behavior, as some Republicans in Congress — finally — realize that a will to cow Congress (especially appropriate for the cowboy in the White House) is behind the attempts by the Bushites to assert the right of an Imperial Presidency to invade the offices of any member of Congress and haul away any and every piece of paper and computer file there, to be inspected by the Presidency for any reason the Presidency might desire.
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Congress realizes that this is not about one Congressman who may be a dirty crook. It is about the right of the Presidency to control every aspect of government — and society: you and me.
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So Congress has united to demand that the Presidency unhand the records seized. There are other ways of dealing with crooked Congressman, and those ways have sufficed for the entire history of this Republic, until now, in the age of the Bushite will to exterminate democracy and replace it with dictatorship by a tiny cabal within the approved Republican Party. Dennis Hastert and other Republican Members of Congress are not part of that approved group.

Until last Saturday night, no such warrant had ever been used to search a lawmaker's office in the 219-year history of the Congress. FBI agents carted away records in their pursuit of evidence that Jefferson accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for helping set up business deals in Africa.

The chief lackeys of the cabal who were induced to conduct this outrageous violation of the rights of Congressmen have pretended indignation so great that they threaten to resign if Congress insists that the papers and COMPUTER seized be returned.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his deputy, Paul McNulty, were said to be ready to quit if the Justice Department was asked to return the Jefferson documents, the senior administration official said on condition of anonymity. The resignation of FBI Director Robert Mueller also was implied, the official said.

By all means, resign, you dirty, un-American bastards!
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If Members of Congress aren't safe from violations of their most basic rights, from Presidential seizure of their most private records of every conceivable sort, then who of us in the Nation overall, can ever be safe?
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We are perilously close to Presidential dictatorship. But you wouldn't know it from public reaction to this horrendous attack upon Congress by the Imperial Presidency — which might have to be renamed "Dictatorial Presidency".
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Commentators from the Radical Right that wants a Presidential dictatorship — as long as the President is a Radical Right Republican, that is; they sure wouldn't want a Democratic Liberal dictator! — are pretending that there is no issue of Congressional privilege nor of the equality of the various branches of government involved here. But what if things were reversed?
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What if Congress sent in its own agents to seize the President's computer and ransack the President's most private files? Would the President consent to that? Or would he assert Presidential privilege against invasion of Presidential perquisites by an Imperial Congress?
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You can bet your entire life savings, and every cent you will ever make from every source, that the Presidency would never permit Congress to assert the right to seize Presidential papers and computers for suchever purpose it might claim, be it corruption or any other excuse. Rather, the Presidency — any Presidency — would assert that Congress is attempting to violate the rights of the Presidency and change this country in a fundamental way, away from a government of separate and equal branches to a Congressional Dictatorship in which the Presidency can never act without expecting that everything it does will be examined in detail by Congress, a Congress that is entitled at any time to seize every paper document and computer file on every Presidential computer in the world to root out anything it objects to.
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And what of the Supreme Court? Would either the Presidency or Congress dare to seize the computers and ransack the files, in the office or home, of any Supreme Court 'Justice'?
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Talk about "chill"! "Chill" refers to the inhibition of any activity by the expectation that one's actions will be investigated and possibly punished by Government — or, in this case, by one part of Government against another.
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How is Congress to do its work if everything its members are thinking can be examined by the Presidency? What about confidential communications between a Member of Congress and a constituent, or even emails between a Congressman and his lawyer! Is the FBI really going to skip over every email between Congressman Jefferson and his lawyers? Or is it going to read every word?
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How is the Presidency to do its work if everything that every member of the Executive Branch does can be examined by Congress? Does the White House really want Congress looking thru everything on Vice President Cheney's various computers? What is on Alberto Gonzales's computers (office and home, desktop and laptop)? Would he be perfectly content to have every single member of Congress read thru every file there? I suspect he would not.
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The people of the United States should, with one voice, shout to Alberto Gonzales, "By all means resign, you piece of sh*t bastard! And take every other would-be dictator with you."
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This is not Latin America, and we don't have 'Presidents for Life'. Yet.
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That would, however, seem to be the aspiration of the Republican Right: that George Bush, that pliant, stupid puppet of a Rightwing cabal, remain in office to the end of his days.
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Of course, all free peoples do have one last remedy against dictatorship: the gun. And there are said to be 200 million guns in this country. At end, we may have to shoot every single member of the cabal that is trying — very, very hard, consistently in many arenas at once — to turn this country (and then the world) into a dictatorship.
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If you don't feel threatened, you're not paying attention.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,464.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:53 AM

 
"All Fresh Prince, All the Time". The Viacom cable service Nick at Nite has gone out of its mind. Completely. It has given over a full week for a marathon of one of the very worst television programs ever made, Will Smith's execrable piece of sh*t The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I cannot express in print how much I hate that show. Yet it appears all over the dial at least 5,000 times a year. At the best of times, it appears four or five times a nite on Nick@Nite. At the worst, dozens of episodes appear nite after nite without letup. Nickelodeon has given over a full week to nothing but Fresh Prince! Why?!?
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For many of us, television is the only relaxation we get at the end of a stressed-out day, but our comfort zone is endlessly violated by programmers who think it would be a great idea to pre-empt all regular programming and attack the audience with unasked-for, unwanted marathons of show after show after show after show after show — you get the picture, but programmers don't — of exactly the same type, for hours on end, whether the audience loves that particular show or hates it.
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The people in charge of programming today have no idea why people watch TV. They don't understand how television became an entrenched habit in popular culture. They just don't "get it". You'd think they'd know, because it is their job to know. But they don't.
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TV is not supposed to be a constant surprise, a gamble. It is supposed to comprise a foreseeable and predictable routine that we can rely upon. That's how TV became a habit with the public.
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Habits are customary behaviors. By their nature, they don't bounce around. Most people need familiar routines. For every day and nite of life to be different from every other would be intolerably chaotic. What if the sun came up at 6:00 a.m. one day, but 4:30 p.m. the next, and 10:13 a.m. the next, and 12:00 midnite the next after that? What if it stayed up constantly for a week, then went away for three days, came up for one day, went away for seven, came up every day but at times an hour or two different each day, sometimes later, sometimes earlier? Would we like that? Or would we all be stark raving mad within a month, biorhythms in a tangle, our bodies scarcely able to function?
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For the bulk of the general population, television plays a major role in their sense of time. To say that it is our sun might overstate the case, but not by much. It is at least, to us today, what the North Star was to navigators of old.
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"If it's Tuesday, then x must be on at 9:30", or "It's 3 o'clock, time for Dr. Phil" or "4 o'clock, time for Oprah."
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Television programmers sometimes forget that we like to know when we can see the shows we like. Would Regis Philbin be hugely popular if his show bounced all over the schedule? Or would the audience weary of hunting for his show and find something else to watch, or just turn the damned thing off in frustration?
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All network programming is experiencing a serious decline in viewership, not so much because people don't like what they find, but because they can't find what they like. Programmers have taken to changing schedules peremptorily to boost one show's ratings by giving it a different lead-in, at the cost of confusing viewers as to what happened to the show that used to be there. Was it canceled? If not, where did it go? Why? Is it on hiatus but coming back? Or is it (quote) "on hiatus", meaning canceled?
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TV needs to clean house of the crazy children, with the attention span and intelligence of a gnat, who now control programming, and give us people who understand that normal people like variety but predictability, not either without the other. We don't want 63 hours of nothing but Fresh Prince, and we don't want entirely different programs every half hour for the rest of the world. We want to know that if it's 10 p.m. and this is Nick@Nite, Roseanne is on. And if we turn to Nickelodeon and find Roseanne is not on, but that Fresh Prince, which we HATE, has pre-empted it for a whole f**kin' week, we are angry.
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I guess viewer anger doesn't matter to the executives of Viacom. They don't need an audience. Or do they?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,463.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:31 AM

 
Third World Unemployment Today, First World Unemployment Tomorrow. My colleague in northern England sent this email about my commentary last Saturday on the utter impossibility of the U.S. or any other rich country competing against China and India:

One interesting factoid I learnt the other day is that the number of unemployed Chinese alone is more than the entire US population! * * *

On the subject of competing hemispheres, I think it's very important to remember that the Western Hemisphere has only one eighth of the world's population. I remember a very impressive animated sequence in War Comes To America, the final member of the Why We Fight series of World War II propaganda films, which describes the reasoning for American entry into the war. [The populations cited are 1940s figures; multiply by 3 or so to get the present-day equivalents.] The narration goes:

German conquest of Europe and Africa would bring all their raw materials, plus their entire industrial development, under one control. Of the 2 billion people in the world, the Nazis would rule roughly one quarter, the 500 million people of Europe and Africa, forced into slavery to labor for Germany. German conquest of Russia would add the vast raw materials and the production facilities of another of the world's industrial areas, and of the world's people, another 200 million would be added to the Nazi labor pile.

Japanese conquest of the Orient would pour into their factory the almost unlimited resources of that area, and of the peoples of the earth, a thousand million would come under their rule, slaves for their industrial machine.

We in North and South America would be left with the raw materials of three-tenths of the earth's surface, against the Axis with the resources of seven-tenths. We would have one industrial region against their three industrial regions. We would have 1/8 of the world's population against their 7/8. If we along with the other nations of North and South America could mobilize 30 million fully equipped men, the Axis could mobilize 200 million.

Thus, an Axis victory in Europe and Asia would leave us alone and virtually surrounded facing enemies ten times stronger than ourselves.

I responded:

YES, the Western Hemisphere does have only about 1/8 of the planet's population. Asia alone has more than half the world's total population, not even counting the European component of the Eurasian landmass, which has apparently stabilized at about 730M and is expected to decline. The Americas (c. 850M now) has more people than either Europe or Africa, but less than 1/4 as many as Asia, which is where the bulk of our "competing" economies are located. Plainly, if China has more unemployed than the U.S. has people, any attempt to give China full employment would eradicate job prospects for much of the rest of the planet, in free trade. Worse, China is actually mechanizing away jobs, replacing people with machines! That may improve the technological capabilities of Chinese manufacturing, but at what human cost? And for whose benefit? At end, we keep coming back to the basic question: what is an economy FOR?

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,460.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:34 PM

 
Glorying in Death. Media have of late focused on the preposterous amount of money proposed for a memorial at Ground Zero, as much as a billion dollars. Yes, that is "billion" with a B. A billion dollars, for a memorial. Preposterous.
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Nearly as many people were killed at Pearl Harbor as at the World Trade Center, but we didn't spend a billion dollars (nor its 1940s equivalent) on a monument at the sunken U.S.S. Arizona. Nor should we have.
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There are some people who, for political reasons, want to keep reminding us of 9/11, and some victims' families who clutch the event to their chests and want to hold it tight forever.
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Life is for the living. Let's just put a tasteful little monument on the site and move on.
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I'd favor a bronze plaque with the events in brief flanked, perhaps, by a few marble panels with the names of the people killed. That's it.
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Compare the monument to the fallen of World War II in Battery Park, perhaps a quarter mile from Ground Zero. No one spends any significant amount of time there, and pretty much no one connects with any of the names engraved there. World War II was a long time ago, and we have moved on. The people who knew those dead soldiers and sailors have also died in the intervening years, and the names are just that: names. So too will the names of the dead of 9/11 be just names before you know it. Just names. All the space devoted to displaying names nobody pays any attention to anymore is a waste of space in Battery Park and will be a waste of space at Ground Zero.
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We can't bring back the dead, and spending too much time and attention on death is unhealthy. Let's just put up a plaque and move on.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,457.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:23 PM

 
Encouragement; Three-Legged Horses. I wondered aloud here May 19th if it makes sense for me to write this blog regularly, which takes some effort. I got this emailed encouragement:

I, too, as do many, find the parallels between ourselves and Rome to be striking. Welfare payments are certainly our "bread" [I did not mention welfare because the U.S. has taken very aggressive measures to prevent welfare from becoming a habitual thing] as are an economy boasting essentially full employment. The modern entertainment industry is certainly pernicious, but not the product of government policy. It simply seems to be an industry maximizing its profits by appealing to the lowest and, therefore, most common, factor. You paint a bad image of what our society has become and I agree, up to a point. But, on balance, I agree with the Roman general from "Gladiator" when he said: "Within the Empire is the light, without lies the darkness." That's why I'm an expansionist. No point in expansionism if the country isn't worth living in to begin with . . .

Your blog concerning free trade made me look at the issue in a new way. ...
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Yes, I read your blog regularly, so please don't feel as if no one reads it. I also read your Newark blog from time to time.

The same day, I got another email from a regular reader, in northern England, so I guess I will persevere.
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I have been concerned recently by all the talk we have had since the racehorse Barbaro broke his leg in the Preakness. Reporters have hastened to say of that injury that it was "life-threatening" because "horses cannot survive on three legs". Why not?
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I have a cat, another quadruped, who broke his left rear leg from no apparent cause (perhaps toxoplasmosis, a hideous attacker). Vets were unable to repair the damage but chose to amputate from about the hip. Leo gets around just fine. In walking, he is awkward. Running, however, he's a flash.
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When I was in grade school, we used to pass by, in walking to school, a yard where a little dog resided. He had NO rear legs, but ran about the yard with the help of a little two-wheel wagon attached to his rear body. So why would the loss of one leg cause the death of a horse?
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What happens to wild horses if they break a leg?
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I am not a veterinarian (and don't even play one on TV*), but it has always been plain to me that no vital organ is involved in a broken leg, so a quadruped, be it cat or horse, should not die from a broken leg. I wondered, however, if, because horses tend to sleep standing, a blood-pressure distinction or other oddity in horse anatomy could justify the assertion that horses cannot live on three legs. Hey! I have seen people with no legs and not even hips scurry about the subways looking for handouts.
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When I did a Google search on "three legged horses", I found a lot of references to a collection of stories by a Taiwanese writer, Cheng Ch'ing-wen, who apparently wrote of a 3-legged horse. I also, alas, found a horrifying article about a practice of some horse owners' selling their seriously injured animals for food.
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Plainly the leg is not a vital organ in any mammal. My thought, that perhaps circulatory problems could produce death in an animal that ordinarily sleeps standing, turns out to be false too. Horses can lie down to sleep. Indeed, one website says that horses can achieve their best sleep only lying down, on their sides.

Horses must lie down, preferably on their sides, to achieve paradoxical sleep. Paradoxical sleep is the stage where complete muscular relaxation occurs.

It's hard to know what is the best thing for the animal in the incident at issue. Horses are plainly not designed right — so much for God's perfect design — that they could break a leg simply by running, which they need to do simply to survive. How do horses survive in the wild, if simply running can break a leg, and merely breaking a leg (temporarily, until healing) can result in death, or wolves, coyotes, or other predators could easily pick off a lame horse?
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I suspect we are being lied to by media when they say that a broken leg is "life-threatening" to a horse, as suggests that a horse cannot live with a broken leg. It seems to me that of course it can live with a broken leg — unless it is killed by its owner!
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Breaking a leg does not kill a horse. Shooting a horse, or injecting powerful depressants into its body, kills a crippled horse. If the owners of horses wish to kill their horses with impunity, they need to assert that that is the better solution for the horse, and make us believe it, not suggest that if they don't kill the horse, nature will. No, nature will NOT kill a horse that merely breaks its leg. Nature (that monster) might make the rest of that horse's life hell, but, absent a powerful predator (mountain lion) or group of predators (wolves, coyotes), a horse with a broken leg will NOT die because of that injury.
____________________

* This is a reference to the long-ago assertion by actor Peter Bergman, in endorsing Vicks Formula 44 in a TV commercial, that he was not a doctor but did play one on TV.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,456.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:46 AM

 
Funny Business from Headline News. I chanced to see some odd occurrences on CNN Headline News while checking events today. First, in one half-hour, some female doctor is quoted as condemning alcohol as disastrous to the human body. That story is not repeated the next half hour. Study after study after study has shown that moderate consumption of alcohol has actual, demonstrable, substantial benefits to health, especially as regards helping people cope with stress, but there are always bluenose neo-Prohibitionists trying to worry us about the consumption of even an ounce of alcohol. News media have an obligation to present a balanced view whenever they are so much as tempted to give a neo-Prohibitionist a soapbox.
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Second, Chuck Roberts' script for a story about Dubya's 'legacy' spoke of Abraham Lincoln as being known for "helping to abolish slavery". Huh? Helping? The "Great Emancipator" was only a helper? Tho it may technically be true that slavery was not finally abolished until passage of the 13th Amendment after Lincoln's death, the Civil War effectively did end slavery as an institution, and Lincoln fought that war to its successful conclusion. For Headline News to deny Lincoln recognition as Emancipator is offensive.
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Further, Linda Stouffer, in reading text about the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration relative to the upcoming hurricane season, pronounced "oceanic" as oe.see.áan.ik. Don't these people have dictionaries?
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Newsreaders are paid a lot of money simply to read aloud. They have an obligation to pronounce things right. If you don't say óe.see.yan for "ocean", don't say oe.see.áan.ik.
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Headline News is a very badly run outfit, that has violated its core commitment, to provide a half hour of world and national news 24 hours a day, by pre-empting several hours each weeknite for long-form programming that has nothing to do with a half-hour survey of all top stories. Instead, Nancy Grace talks about particular crime stories she fixates on, and empty-headed morons talk about entertainment 'news' for hours a nite! Despite having months ago abandoned its commitment to headline news at all times, CNN still dares to claim to be giving headline news "24/7". That's a lie.
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Moreover, the editors' news judgment is wacko. Today, for instance, they devoted several minutes to following, live, an aerial rescue of a man trapped on an island in the racing waters of the rain-swollen Los Angeles River (which in the dry season is the barest trickle). How is that national news? I live in New Jersey. I don't care about a local rescue in Los Angeles. I'm glad the guy was saved, but what has that got to do with issues of social policy, which is why I watch news? In like fashion, Headline News has devoted big chunks of time — in one case, well over an hour! — to following car chases on California highways. Of what conceivable importance to someone in New Jersey, Texas, Iowa, or even most parts of California is some stupid car chase? That's not national news. And following it live is preposterous.
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What about the risks of witnessing disaster? Are the editors actually hoping somebody will die because that would be dramatic? What if the guy in the L.A. River had been swept away and drowned? What if the rescuer lowered by helicopter was unable to get or maintain a grip, and the guy dropped to his death? What if a car chase produces a deadly accident, or a confrontation between a carjacker and police that results in a shootout and death? Is that legitimate news coverage, or ghoulish, sado-masochistic entertainment for Nazis?
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The media are dominated by bad people, and that holds for Headline News as much as for the makers of Hollywood "thrillers".
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,455.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:39 PM

 
The 'Competitiveness' Fraud. The Bush Administration wants Americans to believe that we can compete — no, prosper, magnificently — under free trade with all the world, including the most desperately and dirt-poor. Only a mental defective (or a Republican whose mind has been taken off-line by dogma) could believe such a thing.
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It doesn't matter how many low-paid Mexicans or other Latins from farther south in our Hemisphere we try to draw in, this Hemisphere entire is incapable of competing with the Eastern Hemisphere (a term you rarely hear), because people in the Old World-Third World make almost nothing.
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The Old World is a nitemare, and always has been. That's why WE are HERE. (Sorry, European and other readers: this blog proceeds from and is ordinarily addressed mainly to, Americans, that is, people of the Americas, the land area united by a single cordilleran spine from Point Barrow to Tierra del Fuego.)
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Bush pretends, for the conspiracy of which he is only the human face, that if only we work hard and smart, we can compete with India and China. That's a lie.
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It does not matter one whit whether we are efficient and they are inefficent; whether we work smart and they work stupid; whether we are brilliantly literate and they are only scarcely literate. We cannot compete if they make 1/10th or 1/20th as much as we do. End of discussion.
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All else is moot. We CANNOT compete with people who make 1/10 or 1/20 as much as we do — whether we include medical insurance or exclude it makes no difference, because Chinese and Indian workers don't have medical insurance (China is supposed to cover it by virtue of being a Communist society devoted to the mass, tho one has to wonder, and Indians just have to be healthy or die).
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Americans who make a living wage and have even minimal fringe benefits (health insurance, vacation) cannot possibly compete with China and India. It cannot be done.
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I am not saying, "it will be difficult" to compete with China and India. I am not saying, "The only way we can compete is if we are better-educated and work smarter". I am saying what everyone needs to know with assurety: "Americans cannot make up, in any way, for the difference in wage rates that Asians pull in as against what Americans are paid. It just cannot be done."
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When Bush tells us that we can compete if only this, or that, or the other, you need to know that he is LYING! We CANNOT COMPETE with China, or India, or any country that chooses to compete against China or India. It CANNOT BE DONE. Period.
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We can destroy our own economy, for the sake of trying to compete with countries we cannot possibly compete against, or we can accept that we cannot live as we do unless we insulate ourselves from the worst effects of global poverty.
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There is a slogan among admirers of freedom that everyone must already know: "Freedom is indivisible.' But the human workforce is infinitely divisible, and the poorer paid are always available to take work away from the better-paid.
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At end, society will have to abolish money, but that necessary, futurist cure has little bearing on public policy today. We need, as modern people responding to modern exigencies, to demand immediate fixes for immediate problems.
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Tariffs are an instant fix. They can be passed today and go into effect tomorrow. All the infrastructure is in place to enforce tomorrow's tariffs, as they were able to enforce yesterday's tariffs.
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The super-rich ruling class did not always rule American society, but they always did well. If free trade, with all its horrendous injury to ordinary working people, is abolished, the rich will still do fine, but the rest of us, in the First World, will do much better.
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Working people in the Third World would do best by filling the needs of people in other Third World countries, specializing more or less by design in areas not already taken, so that Chinese companies can supply the needs of poor people in India, Indian companies can supply the needs of poor people in China, and only after all those basic markets' needs are met, other parts of the world can be served.
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The United States cannot be part of that global fix without reducing Americans to Third World living standards (utter penury).
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We can, however, promote far more intensive commercial integration of now-disparate regions of the world. India should be trading intensively with China, and both of those Third World countries should be trading intensively with Africa and Latin America. We of the First World (a term and concept we almost never hear but need to keep in mind) do not have to ruin our own countries in order for the benited parts of the planet to prosper.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,455.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:43 PM

 
Adjusting to Reality; Exposing Lies. I wasn't able to comment here yesterday because I've started a part-time job in Manhattan and haven't found the fastest way in and home again so have to give myself lots of time. I have had to accept limits on what I can accomplish while working for cash. I have two other Internet sites that I pretty much have to update every day, but I never made that pledge here. I have no idea how many people read this regularly, and since I make no money from it, I must give precedence to income activities. (My daily sites are "Simpler Spelling Word of the Day" and my Newark fotoblog, which is a semi-firm commitment to a Foto a Day. I'm not making any money from either of those either, but might in time make some money from fotografy in this niche market.)
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I'll comment here when I have time and am moved — usually, irritated — to comment. Two topics today.
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"Warmest April Ever". The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, a Federal agency, dared to announce May 15th that this April was the "warmest on record". Not content with exaggerating "global warming", scientists are now outrite lying.
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As I write, it is 55 degrees in the middle of the day on May 19th. Assuming it was a tad cooler earlier in the day, the law in New York City, less than 20 miles from me, requires that the heat be on (whenever, from October thru May, the outside temperature falls below 55 degrees)! Imagine that: we have to spend money on heating our homes in the latter part of May! And April was cold, not just here in the Northeast.
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I spoke with my younger sister in Long Beach, California, during April, and she was bothered by how cold it was there, a continent away. So where was it warm? Not in the Northeast. Not in the Pacific Southwest. Where?

The anomalous warmth was particularly concentrated over the south-central United States. Texas and Oklahoma had their warmest April on record, while New Mexico, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee recorded their second warmest. Twelve other states recorded one of their top five warmest Aprils on record. None of the 48 contiguous states was cooler-than average. However, temperatures across Alaska were cooler than average during April, with a statewide temperature of 0.85 F (0.47 C) below the 1971-2000 mean. The record warm temperature led to below normal residential energy demand for the U.S., as measured by the nation's Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index. Using this index, NOAA scientists determined that the nation's residential energy demand was approximately 12 percent less than what would have occurred under average climate conditions for the month.

As the saying goes, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." The sense is that tho a numerical average may be correct, it can be read incorrectly as meaning something it doesn't, as here. If you have 30 days (as has April), and it is cooler by 2 degrees on 15 of them, cooler by 5 degrees during 9 of them, but warmer by 15 degrees on 6 of them, you end up with an "average" temperature that is warmer than normal, because a few unusually warm days statistically more than make up for the 4/5 of the month that was colder than normal. And if semi-arid areas in the heart of the continent, experiencing continental temperatures, are unusually warm, that tilts the 'national average'. But that average means nothing to those of us who are sitting in the cold, running our heat at nite to keep our teeth from chattering.
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How about that "residential energy demand" figure? Excessive heat produces energy demand too, for air-conditioning. So temperatures that are cooler than usual in areas that would ordinarily use air-conditioners would also produce a drop in "residential energy demand", wouldn't they? (Unfortunately, some people are so enamored of air-conditioning that they put it on when it's not needed. Air-conditioning has become a curse in this country. The other nite a chilled passenger actually had the courage to shout to the bus driver to please "cut the a/c", which he did. Most people just suffer in silence, or open a window to let some warm air in. Last nite I had, again, to complain to a staffer at my favorite bar that it was frigid, and he turned off the cooling part of the air-conditioner, leaving only the fan, which was quite enuf to begin with.)
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Note that, in the NOAA passage I quote above, Alaska's temperatures were subnormal. How is that possible? Aren't the polar regions supposed to be experiencing catastrophic "global warming" that will drown coastal cities around the planet? Maybe not.
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And as for the fear we are supposed to have that "global warming" will produce a worldwide desert, tell that to the waterlogged people of New England, who recently suffered thru day after day of torrential rains.
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"Pre-Hypertensive". I heard the tail end of a health report today on preventing stroke, that dared to call blood pressure "as low as 120 over 80 'pre-hypertensive'". Unbearable. 120 over 80 is perfect blood pressure, and has been perfect blood pressure for generations. Now it is "pre-hypertensive"! The medical-industrial complex is constantly moving the goalposts to make us think we have to spend more and more money on doctors and medicines.
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At the beginning of this year, my doctor told me my cholesterol was slitely elevated, and I should take Vytorin for a couple of months, then check back. The number for total cholesterol on the printed report he gave me was 242. The brochure he handed me to explain cholesterol said that normal is up to 240. But he said no, the most recent findings recommend a much lower level. WebMD shows these newer standards:

Cholesterol is considered abnormal when:

Total cholesterol is 200 mg/dL or higher.
HDL or "good" cholesterol level is less than 40 mg/dL [Mine was 46.]
LDL or "bad" cholesterol is 160 mg/dL or higher -- with 190 and above being very high. [Mine was 156.] However, the lower the LDL, the better. An LDL less than 100 is considered optimal; 100 to 129 is near optimal; 130 to 159 is borderline high.

So between the time the brochure was printed, presumably no more than a couple of years ago at most, and now, the medical establishment has lowered the figure by 40 points, 17%. That's nuts. And my "bad" cholesterol figure was under the "abnormal" figure! So why should I take Vytorin?
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Not yet having read anything about this when I left the doctor's office, I took the prescription to my local pharmacy and got an initial supply of Vytorin. Then I read the brochure the doctor gave me and the printed cautions that came with Vytorin:

Headache may occur. If this effect persists or worsens, notify your doctor or pharmacist promptly. This drug can sometimes cause muscle damage. Although uncommon, this may lead to very serious muscle damage called rhabdomyolysis, which in rare cases can be fatal. Seek immediate medical attention if you develop: muscle pain/tenderness/weakness (especially with fever or unusual tiredness). Tell your doctor immediately if any of these highly unlikely but very serious side effects occur: yellowing eyes and skin, dark urine, severe fatigue, stomach/abdominal pain, persistent nausea, change in the amount of urine. A serious allergic reaction to this drug is unlikely, but seek immediate medical attention if it occurs. Symptoms of a serious allergic reaction include: rash, itching, swelling, dizziness, trouble breathing. If you notice other effects not listed above, contact your doctor or pharmacist.

No way in hell am I taking anything that has serious possible side-effects to 'combat' a cholesterol number only 2 points (0.83%) above the normal range of only a couple of years ago! There hasn't been a heart attack in my family, either side, for the four generations we know about. It would be insane for me, at age 61, to take a potentially dangerous drug to lower cholesterol to an artificially low number when I have essentially no risk of a heart attack.
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That this country is over-medicated is widely understood. How many health problems are intrinsic, as against how many pharmaceutically induced? It seems to me that the fewer drugs you take, the healthier you are likely to stay, whereas the more drugs you take, the more danger you face from each drug's own side-effects, and the multiple and sometimes unpredictable effects of drug interactions. For my part, if I take two aspirins once a month, that's a lot.
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People have to bring an active, healthy skepticism to all things "scientific". If it doesn't sound right, maybe it's not right.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,454.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:33 PM

 
Boycott Popups! Among the most irritating things in the daily life of computer users is the popup advertisement, often for companies of dubious honesty. Altho Internet service providers have endeavored to block popups, clever but disreputable programmers have found ways around such blockers, tho a struggle between blocker and popup may explain the freeze we sometimes experience between the time we click on a website and the time a popup appears, during which we can do nothing but wait — and wait. What's the poor websurfer to do?
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One thing you can do is resolve NEVER to click on a popup to go to the site advertised — ever! Not ever! I don't care if it is the most intriguing thing you have ever seen. Do not ever click on a popup except to close it.
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The second thing you can do is complain to the webmaster of any website or president of any company that employs popups. Tell them that you find this intrusion offensive, especially in the case of popups that freeze your machine even momentarily. Tell them that you will stop going to their website altogether, or boycott their products or services for as long as they display popups.
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The third thing you can do is make note of the URL of any website you go to that successfully displays a popup despite your ISP's or browsers popup-blocking software, and tell the managers of your ISP or software that that website has somehow evaded their blocker, and you want them to find a way successfully to block those popups. They need to investigate how popups now evade their attempts to stop them, and improve their software.
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The last suggestion I have today is that if you happen to see, in a popup you can't avoid, a company you actually deal with — that is, if you are a customer of XYZ Corp. and you see that XYZ is advertising by means of popups — contact the advertiser and say you are presently a customer but are so offended that you are will be looking at their competitors because you do not want to do business with any company that attacks websurfers.
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If you have other suggestions, let me know and I will pass them along to readers of this site.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,450.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:00 PM

 
Bread and Circuses 2006 — or Where's the Panic? I had a very disturbing conversation with someone at the law office I am temping at in word-processing. He reported that one of the largest law firms in New York (and thus the Nation), has pretty much shut down its word-processing center and outsourced everything to India. These are dozens of very good jobs stolen from Americans and given to foreigners thousands of miles away, at the cost of quality and convenience to the attorneys, who cannot work side-by-side with the person helping them, as to answer questions about handwriting, grammar, where moved passages go, etc. Instead, the handwritten markup is fotocopied into a .PDF file and emailed to India, where someone who learned English as a Second Language (with British spellings and both British and Indian idiomatic expressions), and who grew up with a script that isn't even the roman alphabet, tries to make sense out of markings that can be very complicated and which make reference to a legal system that isn't even his or her own.
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Surely this cannot really be efficient, but that firm apparently thinks that having to go thru a few more rounds of corrections is worthwhile in terms of financial cost, because they can save several thousand dollars on each American they fire.
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It gets worse. Indians are even drafting legal papers for American law firms. Surely that violates American laws against people practicing law without a license. Why is this permitted?
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Similarly, Indian and other foreigners are practicing medicine without an American license, taking over tasks like reading X-rays and doing diagnoses remotely. Why is that permitted?
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The guy I was talking to is going to nursing school on the understanding that nursing is a job that can't be outsourced. Ah, but the rich can bring in outsiders who will work cheap. So no job is safe in a world where the great preponderance of people are desperately poor. Besides, with as many uninsured people as this country has, how secure is a good income in healthcare?
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There are a minimum of 12 million illegal aliens taking jobs in all low- and middle-income segments of our economy, and foreigners by the boatload are being brought over to take jobs at every level of the economy, including the very highest, CEO's of major corporations. The time to panic is now, before our civilization, our economy, our culture are all gone. But there's no panic. Why not?
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The rich, who are the only people profiting from the extinction of the American dream of universal prosperity and social equality, are able to calm the fears in part by producing false statistics that the economy is booming — even tho the bulk of new jobs pay less than old jobs now lost — by averaging in the obscene wealth of the few with the falling incomes of the many. And the statistics they cite of a booming economy make no mention of the cost of the consumer credit that most Americans live on.
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Of what value is an increase in earnings of 2.3% when the Consumer Price Index goes up 4.7%?* — minus 2.4%, that's what: a negative value! The typical American is worse off today than a year ago, was worse off a year ago than a year before that, and will be worse off a year from now than s/he is now, just in terms of income-to-inflation, without anything else being factored in. But you have to factor in the cost of credit, which for most families is on the order of 18%, and for many, over 26%. Being able to pay only a portion, and sometimes just barely the minimum on their credit cards each month, the typical family owes more at the end of each year than at its start. So not only are current expenses not being met, but families (and single individuals) are falling further and further into debt.
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That makes them desperate not to lose the tiny bit of security they have in being employed, even in a crappy job that pays less than a job they used to have. So if the company cuts back raises or its contribution to health insurance (which the employee then has to make up, further reducing useful income), the employee just has to take the abuse and shut up, because the cost of demanding more is to lose your job. And there's no such thing as escaping debts thru bankruptcy anymore (except for major corporations, of course). If you lose your job, you will still be required to pay all your debts, even if you have to sell your house to do so. If the sale of your house does not cover your debts, you will still be held to your debts until they are all paid off — or you are dead. And then they will try to collect from your kids.
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All the while these terrible things are happening, the rich blame us! We're not educated enuf. We don't work hard enuf. We don't work smart enuf. (We don't work cheap enuf.)
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This is Republican America: government over the people, by the rich, for the rich.
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How do they get away with it? "Bread and circuses".
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The phrase "bread and circuses" is a reference to the means the Roman emperors employed to keep the poor from rebelling. They gave out free bread so emptiness in the belly would not move them to action, and gave free admission to chariot races and gladiatorial combats to keep the people busy and entertained.
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Today's "bread" is employment at low-wage jobs that cover almost all expenses, but not quite. If you don't get sick or have an accident, you will live a life of "quiet desperation", never getting ahead but not being so agitated that you have to take up arms to end the misery.
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To keep people from realizing that everything is getting worse every year, the Republicans offer a combination of distractions.
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- The "you can be rich too" scam: sure, the rich live better than you, right now, but you too can be rich, and then you'll be glad we don't tax the rich, because you won't be taxed either. All you have to do is work hard and save your money (as tho you have any money left over at the end of the month to save), or win the lottery or a jackpot at a casino. Or attend one of those get-rich-quick seminars in real estate or day-trading via the Internet. Work at home, in your spare time for a huge extra income, thousands of dollars a month! Or come up with the next big invention. We'll help you patent it! You can buy real estate with no money down, make minor, mainly cosmetic improvements — we'll help with low-interest loans — and "flip" the property for a quick resale at huge profit! You can sign up for a reality show and win a million dollars, or a record contract, or a comedy contract. You can win an athletic scholarship and then go on to the pros after graduation with a college degree (tho no college education, of course; you'll be too busy on the field to study, and the professors will pass you along without your ever having to learn a thing) — or you'll be drafted right out of high school. You'll get a million-dollar signing bonus and $7 million your first year, endorsement deals for millions more, and be sitting pretty for the rest of your life! Or maybe you'll be discovered by a music promoter, become a rock star, sell millions of CD's — and the money will just come pouring in. Or you can make it as an actor or actress and pull down $8 million per movie or $700,000 per episode of a sitcom or evening drama, and be famous as well as rich!
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Never mind that none of those things will ever happen to any but the tiniest fraction of the population, a fraction so tiny as not to be worth mentioning, much less wasting two minutes of daydream time on,
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Meanwhile, the taxes on the rich that could be used to even the playing field for the rest of us, pay for universal healthcare and higher education for everyone with the ability, will never be levied, because morons think they're going to be rich someday. Where are the politicians with the guts to say, plainly, "You will never be rich. You will always be poor. You are being played for a fool. Wise up!"
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- The entertainment distraction. Never before in human history has there been so much entertainment: music everywhere, at all hours of the day and nite, as plain sound and video-illustrated sound; sports, sports, sports — hour after mind-numbing hour of baseball, football, basketball, NASCAR, all played by pros who make millions, feeding the fantasy that you too can be rich; Internet porn; TV comedies and dramas, visual fantasies of every description "free" in your very own home (never mind that you really do pay for "free" TV, in higher prices for goods advertised, and for the goods of companies that don't advertise but can charge higher prices because they can still undercut the companies that do advertise, and most people pay for cable. Instead of having to sit in a still, empty room and confront your problems, you can turn on noise and pictures with the press of a button from your recliner, and put off thinking about your problems forever. That doesn't solve the problems, of course. If anything, it only makes them worse. But as they get worse, you just pump up the volume of distractions.
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- Religion. The meek shall inherit the Earth. Virtue is its own reward. God helps those who help themselves. God is testing us here on Earth to determine our fitness to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Christianity). This present life is just one of many, and the karma we acquire in this life carries over into the next (Buddhism). In the end, the rich will be punished and the poor rewarded, if not in this life, then the next, or the next, or the next after that. Trust in divine justice and be not proud nor wrathful. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.
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- Scapegoating. It's "the gays". They're responsible for everything that's wrong with society. It's because of the homosexuals that God struck the World Trade Center and is killing our soldiers in Iraq. The drive to extend marriage to "gays" is causing the collapse of society. Never mind that homosexuality has nothing to do with any of the problems of heterosexuals. Gay this and gay that are shiny keys that the Republicans jingle over the crib in which they keep the American public to distract them from their imprisonment in a life of hardship and debt slavery.
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- Tobacco. Tobacco is a New World crop, unknown to the Romans. It has a pacifying effect on tens of millions, which is why it is kept legal despite the obvious fact that it kills millions. And Government gets to levy regressive taxes on it, which rob the poor and stupid so the rich and (think they're) smart don't have to pay more in tax.
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- Alcohol. The Romans had wine and beer. We have wine, beer, fortified wine, fortified malt liquor, and booze of many different tastes and proofs, enuf to drug a hundred million people into complacency and keep them from thinking clearly about their problems.
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- Drugs. Government pretends to disapprove of drug abuse, but actually loves it, because a citizen zonked out on drugs is incapable of analyzing the real causes of his or her problems, then devising and carrying out a plan of action to get back at the people who are making life hideously desperate, so desperate that a person is willing to ram a needle into his arm to get relief. There will never be a solution to the drug problem as long as the rich understand that drugs are extremely effective in destroying the people who would destroy the rich — if they could think clearly. The rich have no desire to bring the problem under control, because drugs keep the poor at each other's throats and away from the rich. No solution can work as long as the rich benefit from the distraction drugs constitute. No "medicalization" can work in a society where over 40 million people, including essentially the entire most vulnerable population, have no medical coverage.
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And as long as the bulk of Americans are hopped up on tobacco, alcohol, drugs, religion, and/or entertainment every waking moment of the day, and made to think that current difficulties will pass and they will be rich someday, they will put up with any abuse.
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Have a nice day.
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* Source: "It's Your Money" segment on News 12 New Jersey, April 7, 2006.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,447.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:18 PM