Category Archives: soap box

Freedom and Politics

My nephew had a good point to a teacher in Florida recently who was pressuring him to speak the words of the Pledge of Allegiance along with his 17 year-old classmates.   “What kind of pledge is it if you have to repeat it every day, year after year?  Once you make a pledge, you’ve pledged.  What kind of bogus, insecure pledge has to be repeated daily?”  The teacher’s reaction is unknown, though my nephew was excused from final exams because his grades were already too high to calculate.

$150,000,000 a year to keep the remaining 166 prisoners (of a total of 779 at one time incarcerated there) locked up at Guantanamo.   This includes 86 cleared for immediate release, people not currently charged with being anything like the worst of the worst, many charged with nothing.   Also at Gitmo is a group of 48 who are probably dangerous haters of our freedom, capable of exacting bloody revenge and even more motivated now than a decade ago when they were first grabbed.  

The problem with these dangerous haters is that they have been tortured by agents of our great democracy and so any trial or attempt to prosecute them would  bring what was done to them into the harsh light of public scrutiny.   So we can’t really try them, or release them.   They truly, truly hate us.

The president, quoted in June 10, 2013 TIME magazine: 

[History] will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism and those of us who fail to end it

An eloquent echo of Thomas Jefferson’s famous observation about how he trembled to consider the harsh punishment a just God would rightfully inflict on those, like him, who owned human beings as part of their personal wealth.

And, like our current eloquent president, Jefferson was instrumental in not ending the practice he deplored.  

Jefferson would have been just as tormented, I’m sure, by the innocent children killed in the targeted drone strikes the president continues to order.  He would have been as concerned about the 100 hunger strikers at Gitmo, 35 of whom are being restrained and force fed twice daily in what the UN Commission for Human Rights has condemned as a violation of international law.  The World Medical Association has declared doctor supervision of involuntary force-feeding unethical.   I suppose they would say the same of physicians who made sure prisoners were not accidentally killed while being subjected to a technique that made them experience drowning in a most visceral and convincing way.  In spite of our best efforts to keep these people alive, nine of them died in Gitmo.   Things happen during war.

I can hear the chorus of freedom loving Americans, and I understand.  Not our fault!  They hate our freedom!  And what about all those innocent people the terrorists they might well be associated with, or are at least sympathetic to, killed?  The UN, bah!  World Medical Association, foo!  How easy it is for the world to cast its judgments down on us, the hypocrites!

I also understand why the trial of Bradley Manning must be kept as quiet as possible.  He will be given a fair public trial, even if much of it will be in secret, and then convicted of betraying this great nation.   Manning disclosed some documents and videos that made the American military look very bad.   Such behavior must be punished harshly and publicly (even if the trial is not) to deter any other would be “light shiners” and people of “conscience”.  

What business was it of Manning’s if a helicopter crew laughed after killing some unarmed civilians in Baghdad, reacting like the machine guns and tiny humans sited in their scope were part of a video game?   Who is Manning to judge that Americans in harm’s way can’t blow off a little steam once in a while?  It’s not like plenty of other civilians weren’t being collateral damage while this particular, insignificant accidental killing of an unfortunately located Reuters camera crew and unarmed Iraqis coming to rescue wounded civilians happened.  The incident was marked classified for a very good reason– WE DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO THINK BADLY OF AMERICA.

I heard recently from the author of a book about soldier misconduct in Vietnam that the My Lai Massacre, for which Lt. Calley, for his part in the slaughter of hundreds, was famously court-martialed (and eventually served 3 years under house arrest), was one of dozens, if not hundreds of such slaughters of Vietnamese villagers during the years that American soldiers fought an endless war against a popular underground army.  

American boys were subjected to terrible things in that war, by a merciless and cunning enemy, things nobody should ever see.  If a few of them snapped and murdered civilians from time to time, well, the Army considered that something we should take care of in-house.   It was taken care of, in all cases but My Lai, by classifying the reports.  And it worked, the accounts of these mass murders remained secret for 40 years or so.  

The author persevered and after a long, grim dance, got these classified reports of other massacres.   He visited the villages decades after the atrocities to interview those who remembered.  There were plenty of Vietnamese who remembered.  The author reports he was struck by the absence of hatred toward him as an American.  The survivors seemed grateful for the chance to tell an American their stories.  It took more than a year for the slaughter at My Lai to come to light, after some traitor or another made it public, after choking down the memory of it night after night, month after month.

It is amazing that the reports of these massacres that the author eventually read were not destroyed, as is routinely done now with compromising evidence (think air controller tapes from 9/11, secret non-sworn testimony given by president and vice president to the 9/11 Commission  that was not allowed to take notes or reveal what they’d said, video of detainee “enhanced interrogation” etc.).

Let us all be prudent, then, and patriotic, and wait 40 years or so before opening the can of worms that this private, entrusted with keeping classified information secret, prematurely and disloyally pried open.   To paraphrase Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, one of the architects of our highly successful overthrow of a brutal and secretive dictator in Iraq to build a free nation in the Middle East, a bulwark against hatred of American freedom and a beacon of democracy to a world mired in ignorance, superstition and poverty:  What we don’t know can’t hurt us.  Or, at least we won’t know what what we don’t know did to us, since we didn’t know it was even there, really.

10,000 Kicks

I saw a quote from Bruce Lee recently, my man Bruce Lee.   “I do not fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks.  I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”  Dig it.

My father could have been woken from a sound sleep, been urged to put on a suit and rush over to the funeral home.  On the trip, even if the place was close by, he could compose a eulogy in his head to make the mourners cry, then laugh, then cry again.   It was a talent he had, something he must have given a lot of thought to at some point.   I saw his notes for a eulogy, five or six words on the back of an envelope.

He was not a professional eulogist, if there is such a job, but he was a very, very good one.   

His example may not be the best one for our purposes here, because it was somewhat innate in his case.    I am thinking of the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.   If I sometimes spent ten hours straight playing the guitar, it was not to improve my playing, it was because I couldn’t stop.  And because I couldn’t stop my fingers got more and more warmed up, I stumbled on new possibilities, parts, voicings for chords, ways to strike the strings.  So love of the thing made me improve, because the playing was  so much fun for me.  The discoveries were an organic part of how much I love to play.  Same with drawing.

This blahg is a kicking board set up in front of my cottage in dreamland.  I come out each day into the fog and kick the board once, softly but with great focus.  I stand and breathe in the cool, wet air.  I kick the board again, harder.  Then I kick it again.  After a while I am kicking the living shit out of the board, smiling as I recall Bruce Lee’s smirked rejoinder to O’Hara, the evil bully, breaking a board in front of Bruce’s face before their fight at Evil Han’s tournament.   “Boards don’t hit back,” says Bruce Lee curtly before bashing O’Hara directly in the scar on his cheek inflicted by Bruce’s father the day his sister committed suicide after fighting off O’Hara and his lecherous bully friends.

Boards don’t hit back.   But if you hit a board correctly a few thousand times you get the hang of it in a way that people who kick things randomly have no hope of ever kicking.

Love, Death and the Bottom Line

A one minute video of a kitten having a nightmare and being comforted by her cat mother gets 51,640,359 views because it’s cute (it is, check it out) and because it adorably shows us what we all want– someone to calm our fears in the middle of the night.  Love is the only thing that really matters, on the way to death, though we live in a world obsessed with the “bottom line”.   Love and the “bottom line” are often at odds.  Guess who usually wins?  The result is sometimes a heavily armed “gunman” acting out unbearable pain.

It will surprise nobody to learn that Antonin Scalia’s brilliant lawyer son, Eugene Scalia,  is the lead lawyer attacking Dodd-Frank’s weak-ass, loophole ridden attempt to regulate the super-lucrative government backed gambling house banks, too big to fail, that enriched themselves enormously while sucking almost every drop of blood out of the economy that sustains it.  Eugene Scalia skillfully drives a tank through the loopholes in the law that require a thorough “cost/benefit analysis” before the government may place any limitation on these monster profit machines.  After all, shouldn’t masters of the universe be able to pay themselves whatever they like?  And why is it their responsibility if people are stupid, sign contracts and lose their homes or their pensions?

You can be sure Justice Scalia is very proud of Eugene, probably hugs him warmly at family gatherings.  Is that not love?

Would it surprise you to learn that the lead attorney for Monsanto, a bland, mild-mannered but deadly mongoose, is Dick Cheney’s son-in-law?  I’m sure the two are very close, share drinks and jokes at family gatherings.  Probably shot a few quail together, I’d wager.  Neither man feels responsible for the enormous damage their actions create because they are following the noble creed that is woven into the American Dream:  prevail.

But this is not the kind of love I’m talking about.  This kind of selectively blind love is closer to death.   The love I’m talking about does not abide the suffering of others.   It is rare, and the key to a calm and productive life, and it spreads like your proverbial wildfire when it touches a person.  That’s the love I’m going for.

WTF — is this really the America that God Blessed?

The detainees [at Guantanamo] who are refusing food have been stripped of all possessions, including a sleeping mat and soap, and are made to sleep on concrete floors in freezing solitary cells. “It is possible that I may die in here,” said Shaker Aamer through his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. “I hope not, but if I do die, please tell my children that I loved them above all else, but that I had to stand up for the principle that they cannot just keep holding people without a trial, especially when they have been cleared for release.” Aamer, a British father of four, was approved for release more than five years ago.

Col. Morris Davis, who served as Chief Prosecutor for the Terrorism Trials at Guantanamo, personally charged Osama bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan, Australian David Hicks, and Canadian teen Omar Khadr. All three were convicted and have been released from Guantanamo. “There is something fundamentally wrong with a system where not being charged with a war crime keeps you locked away indefinitely and a war crime conviction is your ticket home,” Davis wrote to Obama.

The above was written by a lawyer, and law professor, a former president of the National Lawyers’ Guild, an organization that once defended, and included, American Communists (neither a problem in my book, where, in one chapter, actual Nazis get a pass, a nice salary and generous pension, from the US government because of their staunch anti-Red credentials) so you can take that into account if you like.  But, I mean, WTF?!!  The rest of the piece is here.

One Problem with the internet

If your goal is to be mindful, to taste the food you are putting into your body, to understand the effect your words will have before you speak, to be aware of others and their problems, to be calm and present in the moment, you will have already put limits on your use of the internet.

If your goal is to be distracted and/or entertained, to have your views confirmed, to preach to an imaginary choir, the internet is your place.

Know this, though, there is nothing easier to ignore than something on the internet.   Of all forms of communication, e-mail is probably the easiest to ignore.  Like falling off a log, baby.  Yeah, print out that email you sent me, I still never saw it, or if I did, so what?  You never answered that one I forwarded about serotonin levels in decorticated cats.

Bullies, Manipulation and Unintended Consequences

We live in a society that produces bullies, as much as large segments of our society hate bullies and try to prevent the spread of abusive behavior.  How does our society produce bullies?  By its values, or lack of same.   Flip the channels, one zero sum game after another where one individual wins everything while all others lose, often humiliated in the process.   Our prisons are overcrowded with largely petty criminals while criminality, on an enormous and destructive scale, proceeds at a record pace for a class that is never held accountable for their third party abuse of the rest of us.  

Those who spent careers working for Enron and got screwed out of their pensions by the greed and malfeasance of Enron’s executives, remember them?  The tip of the iceberg, as it turned out.  Those folks at Enron were merely the vanguard of the millions whose lives and dreams were plundered by the most rapacious among us.

Blah blah blah.  Yes, my grandmother was a leftist, a lifelong trade unionist, she celebrated when the Czar fell and for a while it looked like the People were seizing control of Russia.  She was a girl during the Russian Revolution and can be forgiven for excitedly believing the best, though she wound up bitter in the end.  There is nothing inherently wrong, one could argue, with one person owning 100,000 times more than the next ten million people have.   Our society rewards success, hard work, risk-taking of the right sort, drive, ambition, inherited wealth and social class.  

Anyway, my point is about bullying, and the background is that it’s institutionalized in a competitive society that extols the mythic rugged individual above all else.  Paris Hilton, for example, is one such rugged individual.

I am working with a group of children that has recently changed composition.  Five children from the original workshop now work together with five new participants.  I am focused on improving the program, making soundtracks during our limited time together, improving the quality of the animation, getting kids to buy into the idea of refining their work.   I noticed some tension, the new kids not integrating seamlessly, and set on an idea I thought would help.  I needed a creative and often disruptive kid from the original group to buy into helping others.

I dislike manipulators almost as much as I hate bullies.  It serves me right, in a way, what happened when I decided to deliberately manipulate this kid, though others would suffer for my action.  I saw how important it was to this guy to feel appreciated, so I took him aside, told him how important he is to the workshop, that he’s a natural leader, that he’s the best animator in the group.  I asked for his help.  He was flattered and immediately responded by changing his attitude.  He began to lead the clean-up effort at the end of the sessions and has been a big help.

Last week one of the new kids was lying on his back, the front of his shirt wet, foam all over his chin.   I asked if he was OK and he began laughing, told me he was fine.  I gave him a napkin and he wiped away the drool, then drooled again.  Soon he was lying in the hallway, crying inconsolably.  I couldn’t glean exactly why he was so upset, he wouldn’t say.   It turned out he was a victim of blow-back, the unintended consequence of my manipulative intervention.

The nine year-old I’d taken aside for special attention has, it would be appear, been crowing over the recognition he’d long been craving.  He became, according to three or four different sources, an insufferable prick to his classmates.  Lord of the Flies!   He’d been mocking this kid, who has trouble using a pair of scissors bordering on a kind of phobia.

I must start each session, as I did last term at a certain point, with the reminder that everyone is there to have fun.  And that you can’t have fun if somebody is bothering you or being mean to you.  We are doing animation, something with a lot of moving parts, parts that require looseness, concentration and teamwork.  The workshop doesn’t work unless people are helping each other.   If you can’t help, don’t hurt.    Simple to say, a little hard to do sometimes, but essential.

Unlike in the real world, I have the ability, in this group, to swoop down and gently but firmly intervene.  I can stop a bully in mid-attack, if I see it happening.   The worst bullying often happens behind the scenes, where the deals are made, and merciless rules are set that insure the bully will never be accountable for the pain he causes his victims, karma or no karma.   Playing God in this little group, I will nip this in the bud, as the cliche goes.  Nip it, I say, in the hideous bud.  Watch.

Peekskill USA

My father and my uncle grew up in Peekskill, NY, a once-prosperous river town on the Hudson River.   As times changed, and transport by riverboat faded from memory, the town lost its most lucrative business and its luster.  It took on the haunted quality it possesses to this day.   By the time my father and his then infant brother arrived from the slums of New York City, just in time for the Great Depression, the town was probably a pretty hopeless place.   The father and sons who ran the hardware store were, according to a cousin who punched one of them in the face on his first day in town, proud members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In August of 1949 there was a Paul Robeson concert scheduled for a picnic area just outside Peekskill.  Robeson’s likeness is on a U.S. postage stamp now, but at the time this scholar, college football star and opera singer was considered by many to be a dangerous Communist sympathizer.   Eventually he would be forced to leave the country.  A powerful, outspoken Negro at a time when black people were supposed to be content with their second-class lot and play semi-comical servant roles in movies, Robeson spoke out against wars of aggression, against Jim Crow, against racism, against police violence, against the exploitation of workers and the unbridled materialistic greed of our money worshipping culture, against so many things that patriotic men like J. Edgar Hoover stood for.  It’s small wonder there was a riot in Peekskill in August of 1949 when he came to do a show there with Pete Seeger and other idealists who, at the time, were regarded as a fifth column, fighting for Stalin under the false banner of “brotherhood”.  

It’s easy to get stressed out people to support the fight against an enemy once that enemy is properly demonized, Hitlerized, Stalinized.  Particularly if the people supporting the war don’t have to endanger themselves in any way, they will support the war effort fervently.  And if they get a chance, as they did on a summer evening in Peekskill in 1949,  to kick some mixed race Commie ass in an ambush where they outnumber the race traitor Commies twenty to one, so much the sweeter.

My father was a World War Two veteran attending Syracuse University on the GI Bill in 1949, if I have my chronology straight.  He had grown up in grinding poverty (a phrase he uttered through gritted teeth when tersely summarizing his own childhood) on Howard Street in Peekskill.   A lifelong student of history and current events, in his early years he aligned himself politically with men like Robeson and Seeger.  He was an idealist who’d been in the army fighting fascism and he was passionate about righting injustice.  He wanted to see the world become less fascistic, rather than more so.  He believed in brotherhood,  civil rights and civil liberties then and for decades after.  He also acted on these beliefs, enduring catcalls and rotten vegetables as a spokesman for the integration of NYC schools after Brown v. Board of Education and its “all deliberate speed”, among other things.  I believe he returned to Peekskill for the concert that turned into a riot when angry white mobs overran it.

My father is gone now, as is my uncle, so, unfortunately, there is no way to verify whether he was there or not.  But visiting my aunt the other day for her 85th birthday I spotted a book on her shelves called “Peekskill USA” by Howard Fast.   I recall that my mother admired Howard Fast (although she acknowledged he was probably not a great writer), and hearing from her that he’d been blacklisted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and also thrown in jail during the anti-Communist witch hunts of that time.

“Peekskill USA” is Fast’s eye-witness account of events in Peekskill on August 27th and September 4th, 1949.  The first one a riot, the second one an actual concert, as far as I can tell so far.  Published by the Civil Rights Congress Press in 1951, and printed in the United States of America (as it states on the copyright page) the book is a collector’s item.  My aunt was reluctant to let it go, though she certainly has not opened it in decades, if ever.  I understood her reluctance and promised to read it quickly, take good care of it and send it back to her soon.

I started reading it this morning.  The forward states that the events in Peekskill 1949 are destined to live forever in the memory of all who oppose fascism.  It was a hope, like many back then, that was swallowed whole during the so-called Cold War.   I often look around at the assumptions that underlie our singlemindedly materialistic society, like the one that says extremely wealthy criminals must be treated under a different, more forgiving, set of laws than petty criminals, and wonder about the actual winners of the Cold War.  

It seems they are the same winners as ever, the wealthiest citizens, casually united by common interests to preserve their sometimes hard-won prerogatives.  So much of the business of the 1% is amoral that it seems churlish to judge it as harshly as I do.  It’s not as though the richest among us want 45,000 Americans to die of treatable diseases every year for lack of health insurance, or want our wealthy nation to have the infant mortality rate of a third world country, or millions of hungry, malnourished, abused American children, or a permanent underclass and the largest prison population in human history.   These are surely forgivable externalities.  In order for some to have 100,000 times the wealth of others, certain sacrifices must be made.  It is only common sense, after all.

I have often thought, with that characteristic uncharitableness of mine, that Fascism prevailed at the close of the Cold War, disguised as Democracy, which, from the beginning, used phrases like “all men are created equal” with a certain puckishness.   The forces of reaction, inherently anti-humanist, amplified through the largest public megaphones, are always behind the status quo.  Why would it be otherwise?

So, if high ranking Nazi spooks were recruited after World War Two and hired by the American OSS, and their extensive anti-Communist knowledge and techniques incorporated into the CIA and used to undermine and eventually defeat the evil totalitarian system of Communism, why should I even mention this, at best, footnote coincidence, here?  If the same baldly manipulative techniques pioneered by Woodrow Wilson’s Committee for Public Information to drum up American support for unexplainable (except in terms of how it enriched certain already rich people) World War One were refined by Josef Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment a generation later to drum up support for the war to cleanse the world of the Jewish virus and its Communist spawn, and if those techniques are still largely in use today by those who promote wars of every kind, why should I draw any negative conclusions?  Why bring Fascism into it?  After all, “collateral damage” is so much better than “murder of innocent civilians” and “Freedom is on the March” is so much better than “what are you going to do about it, asshole?”

I’ll report back on Howard Fast’s account of the Peekskill riots in Part Two.

Sphinxes and Monosyllabs

The speed of modern electronic communication somehow makes the silence of Sphinxes and the e-grunts of Monosyllabs harder to bear.  You may get a dozen emails from somebody you’re waiting to hear back from with no reference at all to the question you may have sent them.   Clearly, Sphinxes and Monosyllabs must be suffered gladly, but, damn…

As I get down off my soundproofed soapbox, I offer this little bit of amusement for the childish side of y’all:

animation workshop, second season

Dig it.

Gratootisblahg

I’m trying to recall, in the cold light of day, the many things I thought about last night, at 3, 5, 6 and 7:00 a.m., that kept me from sleep.  Sure there was loud snoring, but I’ve slept through that many times, joined the hearty chorus myself, no doubt.  There was that idiot banging garbage cans outside starting at 6:14 a.m., but he didn’t wake me, I was up. There was a parade of thoughts, no doubt, books I’d like to write, see in print, read from and talk about to nodding, laughing audiences in book stores.   There are places to do this, even today, in our shrinking corporate culture.

One thing I didn’t think about last night, I’m fairly certain, was an idea I told the mother of a struggling musician recently.   She applauded the idea, even though it was an impossibility that would require a total remaking of American society and its so-called values.  She’d mentioned the difficulty her talented daughter had finding an audience for her music.  She probably also mentioned the many millions generous, socially conscious superstars like Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce and noted philanthropist Britney Spears rake in.

“If Springsteen  and Britney and Beyonce each gave $2,000,000 a year, a fraction of their income, to a fund a music exchange trust fund, thousands of  talented but unknown musicians could be paid $30,000 a year to play five or six gigs a week at schools, Nursing Homes, Veteran’s hospitals, orphanages, hospices, hospitals, children’s aid societies, work houses, prisons, concentration camps, enhanced interrogation centers, etc.  That way you’d support generations of inspired songwriters and performers and allow them to live as working musicians with a large and appreciative audience they could entertain and inspire.”

“That’s a great idea,” said the young musician’s mother enthusiastically.  And it is.  But it wasn’t one of the things I was thinking about last night that kept me awake.

Lebensunswertes Leben

I’m listening to a disabled woman whine on National Public Radio that she can barely live on the $1,200 a month SSD disability payment she gets now.  She complains that her parents, in their eighties and in poor health, with many medical expenses of their own, have very little to kick in from their monthly Social Security check for her upkeep.  

And the President is negotiating to lower future payments to the old and infirm for Social Security and SSD.  I’m sick to hear it, that he’s left the New Deal Social Safety net on the negotiating table in the artificial emergency hostage situation Republican phrase masters, at no small expense, have named The Fiscal Cliff.  I say they forget Fiscal Cliff– call it by what it is, when you ask the weakest to make the sacrifice for other people’s comfort, Lebensunswertes Leben (see FN below).  

This disabled caller is worried, calling Tom Ashbrook on On Point to speak for others like her, people already feeling desperately squeezed, living under the poverty line, a line that is drawn artificially low to begin with.  Do the math, $1,200 a month is less than $15,00 a year, excluding the bounty she gets in the form of the Food Stamps and Medicaid.

It seems, according to her, that the price of the transportation for the disabled where this physically and cognitively disabled woman lives  has tripled in recent years.  It now costs her ten dollars to leave her house to go shopping.   Logic would dictate she go out less often, but somehow, she seems very unhappy with the idea of how much this semblance of independence eats into her meager budget.  It’s not as if this lady is rich, strictly speaking she lives on $14,400 a year.  She doesn’t have a cleaning lady and a driver, if that’s what you’re thinking, Eric Cantor. 

She is calling Tom Ashbrook in the context of a conversation about President Obama’ s willingness to hack at the Social Saftey Net in the name, presumably, of bipartisanship — showing more of his famous willingness to concede on major principles before the horse trading actually begins– and preserving the oligarchic status quo.

“Oligarchic,” a political adversary will say, raising eyebrows and hackles both.  I say, that is the proper name for the United States in 2012, there is no question of it being otherwise as the rich get richer and the poor and gullible are constantly called on to make more and more dire sacrifices.  

It’s not as if I don’t see the arguments against the position  I’m taking.  After all, why should a person making only $400,00 a year be forced to take the hit and go back to the old tax rate before the Bush Tax Cuts?  That’s why they built the Fiscal Cliff (you can be sure that well-paid right wing genius of phraseology, the coiner of  Death Tax, Collateral Damage, Friendly Fire and so forth, was well-paid to coin this hard image of looming, desperate catastrophe)  to capitalize on Bush’s deferred 2004 mandate to privatize Social Security.

How cool would that have been?   Everyone free to freely invest their retirement money on twenty thousand lottery tickets,  or getting mortgages to buy houses to flip, or on the spin of a roulette wheel that could make them fantastically rich — if they had enough to bet with.   2008 would have been a big “whoops…” for millions who would have lost all retirement income, in addition to the millions who did lose everything, (like the employees of Enron once upon a time) after the last unnatural Fiscal Disaster– the huge fraud that led to the massive losses of 2008. 

That organized effort by fantastically wealthy institutions to defraud people with limited means was perpetrated by very, very, very wealthy people, people it wouldn’t be right to prosecute, or imprison, or force to give back billions obtained by fraud and deception.  They are too big to prosecute, and besides, they are not considered a threat in the same way that an angry young black man is a threat, but, if you look at the full picture, these are some very dangerous motherfuckers.  But anyway, back to lives not worth living, those expendable millions at the bottom of the food chain.

The sickening spectacle unfolds, there goes our supposedly liberal President Barack Obama, sleeves rolled up, agreeing to pony up the Social Safety Net in favor of letting the wealthy pay as little as possible in taxes, the old rate before Bush gave them his temporary one-time tax cut gift a decade ago.  

The President seems to have agreed in principle to tie future Social Security payments to a new cost index that would gradually decrease the amount our nation’s oldest and poorest, our most helpless, receive every month.  They’ll eat cheaper meat if the market dictates it, they’ll eat less meat, they’ll live like Gandhi.  We didn’t make them losers.  If they’d made better choices in life they could have also been winners.   We didn’t make the jungle.

Still, I have to ask:  why is the New Deal being renegotiated at this particularly difficult moment for most people?  Whence this radical right wing drive to shred the Social Safety Net?   Are we still fighting the damned Civil War?   Did Germany win World War Two and nobody told me?   Why is the onus for settling an artificially engineered showdown to cut social spending placed squarely on the backs of our most vulnerable?  Why is it being  presided over by Nobel Peace Prize Winning President Change We Can Believe In?  

There must be a hundred more likely places to start to cut the deficit before we talk about cuts to a program that is solvent for at least the next twenty years without any changes.  

There are those who insist we live in the freest nation on earth.  The vast majority of children who grow up in poverty die in poverty in America.  They live shorter, more dangerous lives, their infant mortality rates are like those of Third World mothers.  American children in poverty, in the patriotic view of those who proudly call our nation the greatest nation in the history of the world, have the freedom to choose between obedience, discipline and participation or anger, rebellion and prison.  

A rational actor, the theory goes, would choose to pay close attention as the cards are dealt and gamely play the crap hand he’s being dealt every round.   He is not playing at a high stakes table anyway.  For example, if he or anyone he knew were to die and a corporation had liability for that death, their family would get a tiny wrongful death settlement.  Think World Trade Center bus boy wrongful death number ($20,000) vs. World Trade Hedge Fund guy’s (multiple millions, widows complaining about the meager pay-outs).

“Let’s see,” the lawyer for the corporation negotiating the settlement for the guy’s death from some kind of toxic product or procedure, would say, consulting charts and punching a calculator “a life expectancy of 31 years times an annual salary, interest, benefits and dividends, of…. let’s see…. zero— prisoners in the State prison system do not make very much money, would be…. we’ll give you $10,000.”

The family would take it, in sorrow and in rage.  But really, that’s the game, the way its set up, how the board is rigged, where the finger rests heavily on the scale, how the field tilts, who the refs are, how corrupt and greedy they are, and billions and billions in wealth to be taken, the wealth of the world is inexhaustible, more money than you could spend in a thousand lifetimes, but who cares?  God bless unfettered Capitalism, nobody can put a limit on an American’s right to luxury a million times over, as if he had a million lives to spend it.  

It’s Winners versus Losers, punk.  It’s a clear choice, really.  You can choose the side that wins every time– even if you personally keep losing big time you can still root for the Winners, bask in their glow.  Or, you can side with the Losers, those who will always lose, always be screwed by those who can.  Some are born with advantages, others with disadvantages.  It’s up to you— pick a side.

So this disabled woman talking to Tom Asbrook complains that if the monthly check is decreased, if she’s told to buy a cheaper cut of meat, lose some weight, don’t use so much heat in the house, wear two sweaters inside, and a scarf and a hat,  live like Gandhi, then she will suffer.  The rest of us need it all, so let’s just say, to her and the millions like her:  be quiet and have a blessed day.

FN:  Lebensunswertes Leben (from Wikipedia)

The phrase “life unworthy of life” (in German:“Lebensunwertes Leben”) was a Nazi designation for the segments of populace which had no right to live and thus were to be “euthanized“. The term included people with serious medical problems and those considered grossly inferior according to the racial policy of the Third Reich. This concept formed an important component of the ideology of  Nazism and eventually helped lead to the Holocaust.[1]  The euthanasia program was known as Action T4.