Jajuna

The July 2010 issue of Harper’s magazine features two disturbing articles. One about how Goldman Sachs purposefully drove up the price of wheat (causing massive food insecurity) and the other concerns the takeover of Arizona by right-wing lunatics. Last week Democracy Now interviewed the authors of both stories.

Here is the Democracy Now interview with Harper’s contributing editor Frederick Kaufman who broke the Goldman story.

And here is the interview with Kevin Silverstein on Arizona. I particularly like the campaign add for the woman running for state senator firing the automatic weapons into the desert.

July 12, 2010

Outside the Casino

By BOB HERBERT

The hustlers and high rollers at Wall Street’s gaming tables are starting to feel lucky again.

Hiring is beginning to pick up in the very sector that led the country to the edge of a depression. An article on the front page of The Times on Sunday noted that this turnaround “underscores the remarkable recovery of the biggest banks and brokerage firms since Washington rescued them in the fall of 2008, and follows the huge rebound in profits for members of the New York Stock Exchange, which totaled $61.4 billion in 2009, the most ever.”

The hustlers and high rollers are always there to skim the cream, no matter what’s happening in the real world of ordinary American families.

In a column that was published a few days before Christmas 2007, the very month that the great recession began, I wrote about the record-breaking seasonal bonuses being handed out on Wall Street: an obscene $38 billion, the highest total ever. The subprime mortgage debacle was already upon us and the economy was sinking like a stone, but the casino crowd was celebrating as never before. “Even as the Wall Streeters are high-fiving and ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar,” I noted, “the American dream is on life support.”

The fattest of the fat cats live in a perpetual heads-I-win, tails-you-lose environment. But if you step outside the Wall Street casino, you’ll notice that things aren’t going too well in the rest of the country. More than 14 million Americans are out of work, and nearly half of them have been jobless for six months or longer. The unemployment rate for black Americans is 15.4 percent.

School districts across the country are taking drastic steps to cope with collapsing budgets: firing personnel, increasing class sizes, cutting kindergarten and summer-school programs and, in some cases, moving to a four-day school week. The Associated Press, in a demoralizing report, recently noted: “As the school budget crisis deepens, administrators across the nation have started to view school libraries as luxuries that can be axed rather than places where kids learn to love reading and do research.”

What a country. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the bankers keep living the high life and swilling that Champagne while at the same time we’re taking books out of the hands of schoolchildren trying to get an education.

I’m no friend of the deficit hawks, but the staggering amounts of money we’ve been spending for the past several years have not benefited the people most in need of help and have not laid the foundation for a more secure economy going forward. We’ve handed over unconscionable tax breaks to the very rich (you can see the Prada paraders high-stepping along Fifth Avenue in their million-dollar flip-flops) and countless billions to the private contractors brazenly feeding off the agony of the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

(Sunday’s paper also had an article about six more American G.I.’s killed in Afghanistan.)

What’s needed is the same sense of urgency about helping struggling families and putting people back to work as the Bush and Obama crowds showed when the banks were about to go bust. That sense of urgency is always missing when it’s ordinary people who are in trouble.

Millions of Americans are stuck in an economic depression. Several million have either lost their homes to foreclosure during the recession or are in imminent danger of losing them. The long-term unemployed are facing painful daily choices on such basic matters as whether to buy food or refill needed prescription medication or pay electric bills to keep the lights on.

Back in February, The Times’s Peter Goodman wrote about the new poor, “people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.”

There can be no real national recovery with so many millions of people in such deep economic distress. We can pretend that we’re locked in some kind of crisis of confidence, that if only people felt better about themselves and the economy then they’d start spending again. This is a variation on the “mental recession” lunacy spouted by Phil Gramm, John McCain’s top economic adviser during the presidential campaign.

People who are out of work and deeply in debt don’t have any money to spend. The only way to get real money back into their wallets and bank accounts (and thus back into the economy) is to get them back to work.

With our help, the banks and Wall Street have done fine. Better than they had any right to expect. It’s the ordinary folks outside the casino, in the real world, who are still in desperate need of help. But in a society of, by and for the rich, that help will be a long time coming.

There is something in the air this summer. Perhaps it has to do with the clouds of chemical dispersant and pure crude vapor rising from the now despoiled Gulf Coast. The corporate malfeasance/greed, governmental incompetence, and ecological destruction highlighted by the BP disaster can be read as a vivid crystallization of the simmering malaise currently gripping everyday life in the United States. A case in point, this morning I came across the article below on modern survivalist doomsayers who are ostensibly readying themselves for civilizational and ecological meltdown. It occurred to me that these efforts by those preparing for a “coming collapse” are not necessarily about preparing for a catastrophic future. Rather, they are representations of a struggle between competing visions of the present and future, with one strongly rooted in the present right-wing ontology, and the other in alternative democratic possibilities. For those who might broadly share a “progressive” world view, anxiety over economic and ecological disaster has tended to translate into social projects such as building networks of organic farms and community-based educational programs. In short, alternative sustainable models of life. In contrast, like the couple profiled in the article who despise anything that “smacks of socialism,” the preparatory impulse morphs into stockpiling thousands of rounds of ammunition while turning your home into a veritable securitized fortress capable of repelling and exerting violence against any threat both real or imagined.

I realize, of course, that this contrast is too neat, that there are in fact varying degrees, consistencies, and contradictions in these stories. However, the basic point I would like to make is this. Apocalyptic survivalist ontologies are revealing of more than just lifestyle choices. Isn’t the vision of a wholly private militarized frontier existence precisely what is celebrated and desired by the right-wing in their hatred of all things public and in their pervasive contempt for any form of solidarity beyond a narrow materialistic spirituality? It seems to me that the militarized mode of right-wing stockpiled living is fundamentally about the radicalization of the present. In this sense it functions as a nihilistic self-fulfilling prophesy. For those that still believe another world is possible, they slog on mostly on the margins: exhibit a) 15,000 people gather in Detroit for the US social forum last weekend.

Speaking of last weekend…On my way to Chicago for the fourth of July, I stopped in a small truck stop in northern Indiana. Here I was greeted by the sight of a knock-down nasty confrontation over a gas pump. Apparently the woman thought the man had “cut her off” and they proceeded to berate each other with profanity while jostling over the fuel hose. Upon entering the truck-stop I was accosted by wall to wall flat screen televisions pumping out the latest episode of Happy Fascism with Glenn Beck. Such scenes are vivid examples of where right-wing post-solidaristic survivalist fantasies are generated: i.e. in the Darwinist flux of daily life in the United States.

Prepping for the Apocalypse: The Strange World of Survivalists

By Sara Hussein, Agence France Presse

Posted on July 12, 2010, Printed on July 13, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/147507/

From the outside, Jerry Erwin’s home in the northwestern US state of Oregon is a nondescript house with a manicured front lawn and little to differentiate it from those of his neighbors.

But tucked away out of sight in his backyard are the signs of his preparations for doomsday, a catastrophic societal collapse that Erwin, 45, now believes is likely within his lifetime.

“I’ve got, under an awning, stacks of firewood, rain catching in barrels, I’ve got a shed with barbed concertina wire, like the military uses,” he told AFP.

He and his wife also have also stockpiled thousands of rounds of ammunition and enough food for about six months.

“Several years ago I worked on paying off the house, replacing all the windows, and just very recently, I’m proud to say, we’ve replaced all our exterior doors with more energy-efficient ones, with as much built-in security features as I could get,” he told AFP.

“Plus I’m going to be adding some more structural improvements to the door frames to make it hopefully virtually impossible to take a battering ram to them.”

Erwin and others like him in the United States and elsewhere see political upheaval and natural disasters as clear signs that civilization is doomed.

“We’re hitting on all cylinders as far as symptoms that have led other great powers to decline or collapse: resource depletion, damage to the environment, climate change, those are the same things that affected other great societies,” he said.

For Erwin, the decline is irreversible and the best approach is to prepare for the inevitable.

His pessimism is shared by a wide range of people, from left-wing environmentalists who believe climate change and capitalist greed will doom human society to Christian fundamentalists who think sin will do the same.

They label themselves “preppers,” “doomers,” and “survivalists,” and take a variety of different approaches to the same question: How best to prepare for the coming apocalypse?

Jim Rawles, who Erwin describes as “the patron saint of survivalism,” prefers an isolationist, Christian-influenced approach.

He homeschooled his children, declines to say where he lives, and advises readers of his website survivalblog.com to “relocate to a safe area and live there year-round.”

“When planning your retreat house, think: medieval castle,” he adds, extolling the benefits of using sandbags to protect any new home.

Rawles, like many on the most conservative end of the survivalist spectrum, is also anti-tax, pro-gun rights, and suspicious of anything that smacks of socialism.

But the survivalist movement also includes left-wing community activists, who are devoted to living off the land and have never fired a weapon, and people like Chris Martenson, who quit a job with a six-figure salary that he felt was “an unnecessary diversion from the real tasks at hand.”

He began growing his own food and developed a “Crash Course” that urges people to better prepare for societal instability. He also took over management of his investments and boasts of a 166 percent return on his portfolio.

For Martenson, the wake-up call was the September 11, 2001 attacks, when he felt gripped by uncertainty and totally unprepared.

Erwin had always felt that society would eventually disintegrate, but he and many other US survivalists say the dysfunctional response to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina was what spurred them to action.

“I thought, okay, things are not going to get better… maybe this society, our civilization, the American empire, will collapse during my lifetime,” Erwin said.

For John Milandred, no single event pushed him to leave his suburban home and set up a farm in Oklahoma.

“We just got fed up of working all the time to pay bills and not accomplishing anything,” he said.

A member of the American Preppers Network, Milandred said he and his wife aspired to “grow our own foods and be self sufficient… to live like the pioneers, like our great-grandparents.”

It is unclear how many people subscribe to the lifestyle, but there are hundreds of websites devoted to the movement, and Erwin’s surburban-self-reliance.com attracts visitors from around the world.

The global financial crisis has increased interest in survivalism “bigtime,” Erwin said, but he feels sorry for latecomers to the movement.

“We’ll help them if we can,” he said. “But a lot of people are climbing on board at the last minute and it’s going to be hard for them.”

Saturday 03 July 2010

by: Robert Reich  |  RobertReich.org

The economy is still in the gravitational pull of the Great Recession and all the booster rockets for getting us beyond it are failing. The odds of a double dip are increasing.

In June the nation added fewer jobs than necessary merely to keep up with population growth (private hiring rose by 83,000 after adding only 33,000 jobs in May). The typical workweek declined. Average earnings dropped. Home sales are down. Retail sales are down. Factory orders in May suffered their biggest tumble since March of last year.

So what are we doing about it? Less than nothing. The states are running an anti-stimulus program (raising taxes, cutting services, laying off teachers, firefighters, police and other employees) that’s now bigger than the federal stimulus program. That federal stimulus is 75 percent gone anyway. And the House and Senate refuse to pass another one. (The Senate left Washington for the July 4th weekend without even extending unemployment benefits for millions of jobless Americans now running out.)

The second booster rocket – the Fed’s rock-bottom short-term interest rates – are having almost no effect. That’s because jobs and wages are so lousy that consumers don’t have enough money to buy much of anything, making small businesses bad credit risks and causing big ones to sit on the huge pile of cash they’ve accumulated.

Wall Street and the other biggest global banks, meanwhile, are making piles of money betting against government debt all over the world. These were the same banks and financiers, remember, that were bailed out by government not long ago. But now they’re demanding fiscal austerity, and politicians are once again doing their bidding – cutting deficits in every rich economy that should now be doing the reverse.

The people who are suffering the most from the failure of public officials and the greed of large bankers are the least able to endure it. Unemployment among people with four-year college degrees is barely over 5 percent; among high-school dropouts it’s over 25 percent. Those who have been jobless the longest or who have left the labor force altogether are men over fifty who are least likely to get back in. Families most in need are losing the services – state-supported Medicaid, child dental care, after-school programs for the kids, public transit – they most depend on.

The irony is that had there been no bank bailout in 2008 and 2009, no large stimulus, and no extraordinary efforts by the Fed to pump trillions of dollars into the economy, we’d have had another Great Depression. And because it would have sucked almost everyone down with it, the nation would have demanded from politicians larger and more fundamental reforms that might well have lifted everyone, and set America and the world on a more sustainable path toward growth and shared prosperity: A stimulus that financed the rebuilding of the nation’s infrastructure and alternative energies, single-payer health care, a cap on the size of big banks and resurrection of Glass-Steagall, earnings insurance, an Earned Income Tax Credit that extended into the middle class, and a truly progressive tax coupled with a price on carbon to pay for all of this over the long term.

No one in their right mind would have wished for another Great Depression, of course. But we seem to have got the worst of all worlds. The bank bailout, the stimulus, and the Fed brought us back from the brink just enough to dampen zeal for anything more. As a result, we are now slouching toward a tepid recovery that could just as well fall into a double dip recession, while a large portion of our population suffers immensely.

This is from today’s New York Times. Conservative education scholar and former Bush I assistant secretary of education, Diane Ravitch, has performed an about face on neoliberal school reform. Along with such neocon market fundamentalists like Chester Finn, Newt Gingrich, and others, Ravitch has been a champion of corporate school privatization, high stakes testing, and union busting. That is until recently. In a new book, Ravitch has discovered that these kinds of policies are not only poisonous for schools but for the health and promotion of a substantive democratic culture and polity. In the past, I have not found myself in agreement with Ms. Ravitch who has made a career off of bashing left progressive educators, but I take this reversal as a positive development. In the realm of school policy discussion, this a major ideological about face by a key player in what has become a lock-step ideological consensus on school reform represented by a democratic party establishment under Obama and Arne Duncan that unflinchingly promote a radical corporate agenda in education. Ravitch’s voice may lend crucial support to an opposition who oppose instrumental market-based solutions to socio-educational problems on the basis that they undermine learning and threaten the public good.

Scholars U-Turn on School Reform Shakes Up the Debate

“We totally agreed with what she had to say,” said Eugene G. White, superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools. “We were amazed to see that she’d changed her tune.”

The superintendents gave Dr. Ravitch a standing ovation.

By SAM DILLON

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles.

“What’s Diane up to? That’s what people are asking.” said Grover J. Whitehurst, who was the director of the Department of Education’s research arm in the second Bush administration and is now Dr. Ravitch’s colleague at the Brookings Institution.

Among the topics on which Dr. Ravitch has reversed her views is the main federal law on public schools, No Child Left Behind, which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms. (more…)