Gored

Al Gore has decided not to be a candidate for president in 2004 and who can blame him. The psychotic radical right media, which apparently owns cable news, talk radio and so-called conservative think tanks as well as the religious right, has relentlessly ridiculed him, making him their heir to Bill Clinton. Apparently Gore has few friends in the so-called establishment press, so the radical right drumbeat echoes through other coverage.

If the polls are an indication of anything but the echoes of news coverage, voters have taken their anger and shame over the 2000 elections out on Gore, the victim of that shameful absurdity, rather than Bush, who as president became the country's designated father figure, quickly enabled by fear and war fever.

Never mind that Gore is the only major Democrat to oppose war in Iraq in no uncertain terms; that he has outed the psychotic radical right media, come out boldly for a single-payer national health care plan, and has strongly opposed Bush's suicidal economic and environmental policies.

The people who thought and still think that there is no essential difference between a President Gore and a President G.W. Bush are fools. Even those in the immediate post-9/11 days were reverently whispering that maybe Bush was meant to be, are seriously deficient in judgment. The idea that Gore wouldn't have handled himself well, or guided the country to a much more effective response to terrorism with much less threat to domestic rights, is dumb and insulting to Gore. Maybe he doesn't have the fratcharm aplomb of Bush, and the nation is often more comfortable with the dumb regular guy than somebody who might know something, but we would be so much better off right now with President Gore that our situation amounts to yet another national tragedy.

Gore didn't run a good campaign, he squandered his political capital and he's paying the price. But it turns out that the thrust of his campaign, which struck people as odd in such flush times, was just ahead of its time. He talked about fighting for working and middle class Americans because he knew that even in the Clinton years they were the ones left out and left behind, along with the working poor and the unable to work poor. The Clinton prosperity had to be extended, and Act II---the Gore presidency---would use the hard-won benefits of budget surplus to make up those social deficits, to strengthen Social Security, to adjust welfare reforms now that many of its premises and provisions have proven to be delusional, and by now to lead the charge for national health care, among other needful things.

People didn't understand this all that well in 2000, and Gore didn't do a great job of explaining it---and probably the press did its usual poor job of communicating what he did say. Only the president---and only occasionally---gets to have what he says simply reported, and then commented on. What everybody else says (and what the president says most of the time) is packaged by news show biz interpretations, and most of the substance is left out.

But the Bushies understood it, so the first thing they did was vaporize the surplus with tax cuts for the already deliriously and shamefully wealthy, and more military spending. So now it seems they can't do anything but privatize the public sector, so people can pay even more in fees than in taxes in order to benefit lobbyists, advertisers, accountants and lawyers specializing in takeovers and corporate consolidation, just to have expensive and bad health care, and expensive and bad schools and so on. And they can turn their social security checks into lotto cards playing the stock market.

So for 2004, candidates can do worse than resurrect some of Gore's 2000 phrases and speeches, because it's becoming obvious who is getting gored by the current administration.

You Never Know: A Response

by Phineas Dash

My brother Theron vented spleen on the outcome of the midterm elections, a family custom. (See below: 11/6/2002) I offer not a rejoinder exactly, because mostly I agree with his point of view, but a response of a more philosophical tenor.

While attempting to minimize their official gloating in the intervening time since the election, the Bushies have nevertheless begun to spend the spin capital of their alleged victory of ideas, as well as use the perception of elected power to quietly push their agenda. This is just as dangerous as Theron said, insidiously so since a lot of it is relatively subtle. Still, San Francisco columnist Jon Carroll caught on to the implications of a Bushie proposal to take control of the dissemination of federal government information from the Government Printing Office and give it to the politically controlled cabinet agencies: even technical information will be subject to censorship and spin. It's likely the public never would have seen the recent report on global warming that "the bureaucracy" produced, because it contradicts the Bush line.

Several columnists and newspapers have also caught the biggest move the Bushies are making, without official accountability to anyone: by administrative fiat, they are instantly destroying the jobs of more than three quarters of a million federal civil service workers, a bold and insidious slaughter in their ongoing class war. In the guise of privatizing for efficiency, they will further cripple the federal government---good for corporations that don't like being regulated---and ensure that these functions (for they aren't getting rid of the tasks, just the people doing them) will be performed less efficiently by lower paid workers, without the benefits and status and above all, job security of the civil service, since that would conflict with the Bushies' political agendas. It's what we're going to get more of: politicizing the government, centralizing the control, class warfare.

The Homeland Security act is rife with special interest provisions benefiting corporations and limiting the public's ability to get information about the government (by negating Freedom of Information Act rights) while it increases government's ability to get, organize and store information about the public. This is "less government"? This is Big Brother.

Last year a Hollywood film ("The Majestic") was able to rewrite the history of the 1950s so that a falsely accused screenwriter could tell off the House UnAmerican Activities committee and the public automatically saw that the injustices of the McCarthy/Hollywood Blacklist were themselves un-American violations of liberty. Don't you think that actual Hollywood screenwriters tried to make that speech at the time? It got them jail time for contempt, and a vast chilly silence from the public. Well, it's happening again--there are already blacklists relating to supposed terrorists making the rounds, denying people their rights, getting them fired or not hired, getting them tossed off airplanes, etc. The lists are full of mistakes but since nobody knows who really compiled them, there's nobody to talk to about correcting them--same as in the fifties. The difference is that everything is computerized and the lists are all over the place. And this is just the beginning...

It's supposed to be for the war on terrorism but just how sincere that is could be seen on Bill Moyers' "Now" (in a report by San Francisco's KQED)that blew the whistle on John Ashcroft for contorting the law in contradiction to his own Justice Department so he could meet the demands of the National Rifle Association. While proposing that virtually all personal information of all citizens be open to scrutiny by Homeland Security, he steadfastly denies the FBI access to current federal records on gun purchases. To fight the war on terrorism, apparently the FBI needs to know what books you take out of the library, but not who is illegally buying hundreds of assault weapons at gun shows.

So I don't dissent from Theron on the Bushie Republicans and their radical fundamentalist reactionary agenda. However I would like to offer some rays of hope on the Democrats.

The day after the election, Richard Gephardt fell on his sword and resigned as the House Democratic leader. It's the best thing that could have happened, next to Tom Daschle also resigning as Senate leader. These guys aren't dishonorable men, but their leadership has led down a dishonorable path. Gephardt's move signals that the Democrats have recognized their strategy's failure.

The House Democrats then elected Nancy Pelosi as their leader. Both before and after her election, she said that Democrats have to state their positions more clearly, especially their differences with the Republicans. When news surfaced that Hilary Rodham Clinton was likely to be asked to join the Senate leadership, she said pretty much the same thing. This is as close as politicians will get to saying that the era of big cowardice is over.

We'll see. But if there is any immediate hope in the Democratic party, it's Nancy Pelosi. Born in Baltimore and representing a San Francisco district, she can sound uncannily like Bobby Kennedy in her inflections as well as her words. She's already gotten under the skin of Republican commentators, which is a very good sign. She was tagged as a "latte liberal," which consolidates insults to liberals, Californians and baby boomers, via the fashionable slander by the likes of David Brooks. Maybe it insults Italians as well.

Responding to her election, right-thinking columnist George Wills was aghast at the Democrats' stubbornly embracing their core values which, according to him, were repudiated at the polls by right-thinking Americans. Wills seems to feel that standing up for the non-super-rich,for social justice, against reactionary fundamentalist economics, and against indiscriminate killing of helpless people to enrich oil men and tighten their control of our erstwhile liberties, is all in rather bad taste.

Democrats have apparently chosen instead to see the lesson of the election as caused not by incomplete capitulation but by too much of nothing. They're probably correct--they lost a lot of close elections, and the war fever/patriotism p.r. campaign that substituted for a political campaign may have made the difference. In any case, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. Be who you are.

The Democrats have to state clearly and eloquently what's wrong with the Bushie foreign policy and economic fundamentalism in terms of harm to the country as a whole, and to the majority of its citizens. They must state clearly and eloquently how their policies express their core values: the way things ought to be.

The Democrats must do all this while focusing on the future. Yes, the future looks about as grim as Theron indicated, even taking into account election night depression. But it's not set in stone. The other night on "Now"---after a discussion describing a present that sounded a lot like "the future" that our brother Morgan depicted in a novel he wrote in the early 1980s---Bill Moyers asked Harper's editor Lewis Lapham whether he was optimistic about the future. "Sure," Lapham said, "because you never know. You never know."

The future is that which has not happened yet, therefore it is the open sea of possibility. There are two principal attitudes it is possible to take about the future: fear or hope.

The Republican reactionary agenda is about the past. It is about fear. Fear is a great motivator, but it isn't very smart. Hope requires consciousness, if is anything more than denial masked in cheerfulness. Years ago Arthur Schlesinger called liberalism the politics of hope.

Yes, hope requires a vision, and hope for our future requires a new and complex vision. But hope is also political, and of the moment.

"People don't eat in the long term," said Harry Hopkins, FDR's most valuable aide. "They eat every day." Hope is first of all about the future as a succession of present moments. Without working towards decency in the present, hope had no meaning in the political world. And hope is all about meaning, or it doesn't exist, it doesn't motivate, it doesn't produce the pause to evaluate, to overcome fear.

A better today fosters a better tomorrow, although a better tomorrow requires more: it requires dreams and hard work, persistence and imagination. It requires dedication to a larger agenda, while respecting the needs of participants in the present.

Hope is directed to the future, but it animates the present. I don't call myself an optimist or a pessimist. The mind may see the enormity of our present self-destructiveness, and disengage. The heart might despair, or it might flutter anyway in the joy of living that is pretty stubborn as a survival tool. But pessimism of the mind and optimism of the heart meet in the soul. The soul is the essence of being human. The only human attitude to take to the future is hope. So I am hopeful.

Hope and fear mix in the soul, and we do the best we can. But hope is a low persistent flame that flares up now and then, like a mother's smile. Fear can too easily become a roaring fire that consumes everything. We must bring hope back into the public and the political worlds of discourse and decision, and fan those flames.

A society that thrives on fear forgets the future. Fear burns up the present. The Democrats must once again become the party of the future. "The New Frontier," JFK said in accepting the party nomination in the summer of 1960, " is not a set of promises. It is a set of challenges." It is that philosophy, not necessarily that program, that Democrats must revive.

The American Party System Made Easy: Theron's Election Night Report
by Theron Dash


The voters---all 30% or so of them---have spoken, and now we will get the gloating. Republicans are very good at it. Their money and their ideas---which amount to the same thing---have won the day, with considerable help from Democrats, the corporate media, and the people who will live to regret the consequences of this election, even if they never quite connect those dots. They voted patriotism but what they will very likely get is oppression, war and Depression. They are already getting arrogance.

The Republican party is the party of arrogance. It is the party of mean-spirited arrogance with a happy face. No Democrat can whine as loud or become vicious past the point of psychosis like Republicans, though by now apparently nobody remembers how these folks eventually scared them during the Clinton years. Just as they don't remember the results of Republican arrogance when in power, like all the scary craziness Reagan and Nixon instituted.

Now the Republicans have been given a huge shot of perceived power, so you can expect very scary things for the foreseeable future. Like war, body bags and dead babies, plus more tax cuts for the wealthy while the rest of the country goes under. There's nothing and nobody to stop them now. They've gotten away with the incredible arrogance of the corporate foreign policy establishment represented in this administration. There's nothing to hold them back now. But their arrogance won't stop with mere war. They will pursue a domestic agenda that will materially impoverish what remains of the middle class, and they will ignore environmental crises as long as the snow machines at Aspen are unaffected.

With this perceived power freshly minted, they are already reinforcing the expression of their arrogance as the only acceptable language of political discourse. We will hear nothing but the wonderful things tax cuts for the wealthy and privatization will bring, as if there had never been a federal budget deficit caused by these policies of Republican Reagan, and as if the economy weren't now crashing and consumer confidence with it. Hey, even Newt Gingrich was rehabilitated for TV in time for the late election night news.

We will hear how paying taxes is a horrible burden, but going broke paying for health care, retirement and all the formerly public utilities and services privatized by the likes of Enron, while people work harder for less or else can't find work at all-well, that's good, that's free enterprise. That's arrogance.

And in this election, by and large the Democratic party turns out to be the party of cowardice. Most of its Senate candidates backed the Bush war and the Bush tax giveaway to the arrogant wealthy. Some apparently did so because they thought they had to, in order to win. So instead of standing up for principle and risking the consequences, they were cowards and still lost. The American people were cheated out of the debate they deserved and very probably wanted.

The party of arrogance versus the party of cowardice is not much of a choice. The Green Party in America is the party of self-righteousness and denial, and is no choice either.

There are a dwindling number, but still some decent members of Congress and the Senate, and reasonably good governors, but no national leaders so far to counter Republican arrogance and Democratic cowardice. There are two possibilities---other than dumb luck or divine intervention---for the near future. The first is the beginning of renewal through political turmoil, outside the electoral system, putting pressure on the parties. That unfortunately is most likely to occur because of horrendous war or economic Depression, or both simultaneously (and thanks to technology, it is more than just possible to have both at the same time.)

The second is to continue present trends, which on an historical timeline will look like the fitful, slow decline of America. This was probably just as invisible to most people in other declining civilizations as it is to most people in ours.

American democracy, once the envy of the world, is failing. It's somewhere between a plutocracy and a kakistocracy. The big money, the low turnout, and now the outcome of this election. The policies of the Bush administration don't match up very well with the real world of the twenty-first century. American ingenuity and efficiency, once the envy of the world, is stuck in obsolete ideologies.

When Senator Paul Wellstone died, many media reports called him a "60's liberal." This is the extent of how successful Republican ideology has been in taking over the terms of the debate. Wellstone's critique was based on principles he derived in part from Robert Kennedy for instance (and those who called themselves liberals in the 60s didn't consider RFK to be one of them), but which was clearly responsive and relevant to contemporary contexts, especially in terms of corporate power. Wellstone was indeed one of the last officials in Washington who reinvigorated this tradition and was energized and guided by those principles and passions. But that he could be so easily stereotyped as quaintly out of step, when in truth it is the Republican ideology that is in a state of rigor mortis and bears no relation to reality, characterizes the current perversity of public discourse.


America is not only behind the times, it is behind most of Europe in dealing with civic, social and environmental realities. If America didn't have the world's largest nuclear arsenal and most advanced weaponry, other nations wouldn't be wasting so much time listening to what our leaders say.

Arrogance, cowardice, viciousness and oppression, the suppression of criticism and creativity through federal, corporate and self-censorship, and as a thoroughly predictable byproduct of greed, envy and lies. Did I mention arrogance and cowardice? That's what's we have, and much more is coming. As well as lots and lots of noise.

Remember these words. You might not see or hear them again.

Millennium II: The Rich and the Poor of It

(In the backward world of Blogs, Part I follows Part II)

by Theron Dash

Now here are some additional facts, courtesy of Kevin Phillips, author of "Democracy and Wealth": A periodic Business Week survey showed that the ten best paid executives in 1981 made an average of $3.4 million. In 1988, the top ten averaged $22 million. In 2000, they averaged $155 million.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the average after-tax, inflation-adjusted cash income for the top one percent of Americans in 1979 was $256,000. By 1997, it had more than doubled, to $644,000. But rising tides lift all boats, right? That big money trickles down. The middle one-fifth made an average of $31,700 in 1979. In 1997: $33,200. That's a big $1500 gain.

But they should count themselves fortunate. In 1979, the bottom fifth got an average of $9300. In 1997: $8700.

So it's little wonder that a new study of 13 industrial nations (I found this one myself, in Scientific American) shows that the best country for a rich child to grow up is the good old USA. For a poor child, the worst countries are the U.S. and the U.K.

Phillips writes and talks about the distortions of democracy caused by such immense disparity, and the behavior of the rich that goes along with it. But let's keep our eye on the money for a moment.

I personally am still mystified by what people who make hundreds of millions a year do with that money. But I am not confused about where that money comes from. It comes from everybody else.

You don't have to draw diagrams for people who have seen their retirement funds disappear because of recent corporate corruption and burst bubbles of one kind or another. They know their money ended up lining the golden pockets of executives.

Unionized industrial workers have known for more than a century where the riches come from: their blood, sweat and tears. Sure, there's technology, innovation, smart management, business acumen and all that—--but those are neither rocket science nor exhausting, life and health threatening labor. Nothing gets made and nothing runs without the contributions of skilled and unskilled labor.

But what about the rest of us? It's been fashionable for several decades now for TV stations and newspapers to run some regular feature exposing practices which waste government funds: taxpayers' money. Government mismanagement, waste and corruption. This has become so reflexive that I saw a series exposing Medicare and Medicaid fraud—the fraud was perpetrated by sleazy subcontractors and doctors—that is, people in the private sector—--but the blame was on government regulators (the few that were left) for not spotting the fraud sooner.

Anyway, the tag line for this kind of report is usually something like: It's Your Money. Well, guess what. That money that disappears because of corporate fraud is your money, too. And so is the money that these rich folks make by exploiting a system stacked in their favor. It's not just money you could have made. IT'S ALL YOUR MONEY.

Why is your health insurance bill so high? Why does your cable TV bill keep going up, despite the promises of de-regulation that it would go down? Ditto your electric bill?

Because costs are higher, they say. The cost of insuring the sick—all that expensive medical care, for example. Doesn't TV news say so?

Sure, medical care is expensive. Then again, if it's just the higher costs of care, how is it that health insurers are able to spend so much on political lobbying? How do they become such huge and powerful corporations? How is it that cable companies can buy up other companies—where does that money come from?

Guess.

Then there's advertising. You think you only pay for advertising when it pops up on top of the news on your computer so you can't read anything, or when up to a third of the time you're watching a TV show you're watching commercials. But you are paying for that advertising with more than frayed nerves. You pay for it all—not once, but twice, at the very least. And that's even before it does its job: getting you to buy something you don't need and didn't know you wanted.

You pay for advertising when you buy the product. Advertising costs are build into the purchase price. You pay for advertising again when the company gets a tax deduction for it, and your tax dollars must make up the difference.

And all that political lobbying and campaign money— that's part of the purchase price, too, and a lot of that is also deducted. So you are paying for all the laws that get written by businesses and passed by lawmakers beholden to corporate contributors and looking for perks and cushy jobs when they retire. A lot of those laws may not be what you favor at all. They may be against your interests, not to mention your principles. But you have no choice. If you want the product or service, you pay for a corporation's ability to manipulate the system for its benefit. Chances are, thanks to these laws you're paying for, you'll be paying more somewhere else down the line.

You paid for privatization and deregulation. So now you're probably paying more for both health insurance and out of pocket medical expenses; more for cable, more for electricity. You've paid to permit and encourage corporations to control access to more and more of the necessities of life, including water and seeds for growing food, so you'll be paying more and quite possibly getting less.

You're paying for television dramas that demonize the poor. You're paying for rich TV anchors and television news that is controlled by huge corporations, so you're unlikely to get any news or information that doesn't contribute to the riches of the rich, or any information that might threaten that power and those riches.

You may be paying for all this by working two or three jobs and never getting enough sleep, by worrying constantly about how to pay for a child's education or health care, or how to avoid being downsized into a cardboard box.

We live our lives as best we can. But let's be a little bit clear about the context. We pay for health insurance if the government does it, or if private companies do it--plus we pay their profit. We pay for political contributions even when they go to candidates and causes we don't favor. Campaign reform is a consumer issue. Corporate lobbying is a consumer issue. Paying to have our communications media controlled by private interests is a consumer issue. The current health care system is a tragedy, within the larger tragedy of what's happened to the political system and the social system, and we are the tragic saps for letting this happen. And we're paying for it. Again and again.

This is the Millennium that is

Here's how the new millennium began: In 2000, the average CEO was paid more for one day's work than the average wage earner got all year.

What about those above-average CEOs? Well, the CEOs of 23 of the larger companies the SEC and other government agencies are investigating for various skullduggeries were above average in pay by about 70%. Which is about the same percentage that their companies' market value dropped in the year and a half after January 2001. But so far they haven't had to give any of their money back. Which, by the way, added up to $1.4 billion between 1999 and 2001.

Thanks to these above-average CEOs, some 160,000 wage earners no longer earn any wages in these companies.

Those average CEOs saw their pay go up by 571% in the 1990s. So the average CEO made almost six times as much in 2000 as in 1990. Average workers' pay rose by about a third.

But fortunately, Americans are no longer dependent on mere wages—we have become a nation of capitalists, earning from investments in the stock market. Or so we're told. We heard a lot about how average Americans became stock market investors in this new millennium, proving how robust American capitalism is in spreading the wealth. Turns out that the bottom 80% of stock owners hold less than five percent of all stocks. The top one percent owns nearly half. That's consistent with the lopsided statistics on wealth in general.

So much for statistics. How about some damn lies? You've seen those lovely Wal-Mart commercials—the bouncy old folks, the smiling minorities talking about how great it is to work at Wal-Mart. After all, it's the biggest damn company on the planet! It employs more people than the U.S. military!

It's also a defendant in thirty states—that's 30 out of 50—because some of those happy employees say their managers force them to punch out after their 8 hour work day, but continue to work—not for overtime, not even for the same rate of pay (which itself would be illegal), but for NOTHING. Which is real illegal. Wage slaves? Nah. These are your old-fashioned kind. No-wage slaves.

Most of this information comes from a column by Arianna Huffington. She used to be the female Henry Kissinger—on every talk show with her relentlessly annoying yet hypnotic voice, talking the conservative line. She should have spelled her name Air-ianna. Her former husband, multimillionaire Michael H., ran for governor in California. He preferred to let his millions (and Arianna) speak for him, since it seemed he had nothing much to say. He lost, and Arianna promptly divorced him. In recent years she's become a persistent voice for that lower 80%. What happened to her? That could be quite a story.

Addendum to the 10/7 essay on stopping the war
by the Dash Brothers

Before the folks at Washington Week in Review turned to their real business of the evening---helping guest star Tom Friedman sell his new book---one of them mentioned that although the Democrats in Congress caved, every single Latino in Congress and most of the black members voted against the Bushwar. Think about it.

The one person who can stop the war

There's now just one person in the United States who can stop the invasion of Iraq. He's probably the only person in the entire world who can stop it. Saddam Hussein couldn't stop it, even if he gave UN inspectors the keys to Iraq on his way to retirement in Argentina--- unless maybe he does it after the November elections.

The only person who can stop this war cold, is Colin Powell.

Right now it doesn't look like he's inclined to stop it. On October 1, after Iraq and the UN inspectors agreed on a procedure and the American stock market shot up like a skyrocket, Secretary of State Colin Powell went out of his way to say that the old inspection process isn't good enough, and that the U.S. would push ahead with a UN resolution demanding full access, with the penalty spelled out.

But this may be a tactical move to outflank the war-fevered politicos in the White House. Powell also said that the UN resolution would naturally reflect the process of negotiation with other nations---that is, it might be a compromise. This puts him in the position of possibly getting some kind of resolution he can use within the administration as an argument against invasion. If Iraq hasn't done anything really egregious by then, this might work. Right now the Bushies are so self-inflamed and inflated that they won't take yes for an answer from Iraq or anybody else. Only Powell can slow them down.

Whether he will or not is an open question, but it seems unlikely that the Bushes can go ahead without him. Powell is the only person in the administration who is known and respected internationally. More to the point, he is the general who ran what was militarily an invasion of Iraq in the Gulf War. The Bushies need his support and participation desperately.

Even a glance at the current situation suggests why. There is little international support, and some important international opposition to this invasion. While the Bushies are using television pretty skillfully to create the drumbeat for war (not that this is too difficult), it's hard for anyone who's paying attention to avoid realizing that nobody has made a good case for why this "regime change" must occur right this very minute. There's been no clear and present danger demonstrated, and as the stock market reflects and many forecasters agree, a war is not likely to be good for a precarious economy. The only reason to be talking about this right now is to increase Republican chances in the congressional elections.

It's all part of a coordinated strategy. Republicans throughout the country are draping their TV ads in the red, white and blue, trumpeting their patriotism and calling into question the patriotism of Democrats. It wasn't a slip or a mere sentence, when President Bush castigated Democrats in Congress for concentrating on petty special interests ( you know-- like prescription drugs, the economy), and said they weren't concerned with national security. It is a political strategy.

Does everyone understand the political motive? That's also an open question. Democrats are scared to death of appearing to be political on a matter of war and peace, even though they all know that politics is what all the war noise is about. Congressional mail is running heavily against the war, and Democrats see it at 20 to one against or more, but those campaign ads scare them.

Of course, politics may not be the main reason. Politics might even be a smokescreen. It may also be that the representatives of Big Oil in the White House (which includes nearly everybody of any importance) are using the political argument to advance their own interests with a takeover of Iraq and possibly other areas of the Gulf.

I'm still waiting for someone to tell me why this isn't delusional. The idea that the U.S. can run the Gulf region like an oil corporation is insane. They can't even run Afghanistan. An invasion of Iraq is at least equivalent to Vietnam in quagmire potential, but then this war isn't being led by the best and the brightest. They're looking more like the worst and the dumbest.

But it's the insanity of the situation that may offer the greatest hope, because Colin Powell, even though a Republican, does not appear to be crazy. He is going to look at what it takes in personnel and technology, in logistics and costs, to first of all successfully invade Iraq and take down Saddam. That might be relatively easy, but costly (not that we'll know the cost for years to come), or it may take a long time and be very obviously costly in every possible way.

But then he's going to look at what comes next. "Regime change" sounds so simple. But the last time America with a huge coalition behind it invaded Iraq---led by Colin Powell--- the march to Baghdad was stopped short. Why? Could it be that Powell knew that the cost of regime change was beyond what the coalition would commit to doing, in resources, attention and time?

This time is different. It's worse. There isn't even a coalition. Last time in the Gulf the American military did most of the warfare, and the coalition mostly paid for it. Guess who pays for the whole thing this time? Odd how the tax cuts for the wealthy will be kicking in right about then.

But if Powell and others manage to string out the preparations past the November elections (and maybe that's the plan anyway), a short hangover may be followed by more sober assessments. Still, there may come a time when Powell has to step up, lay out the facts, and even lay down the law.

If Powell is ultimately against an invasion, how could it possibly happen? The Cheney wing would probably like to see him resign, but not on the eve of the largest military operation of the twenty-first century so far. Not when he is the most prominent African American in a government leadership role, and a lot of the men and women who will actually have to do the fighting, killing and dying are African Americans. They have little in common with the rest of the Bushies, for their veins do not run with oil, and their parachutes are not made of gold.

If it comes to a war he believes is a mistake, will Powell go along with his Commander in Chief, or will Bush blink first? It's possible Powell would publicly support an invasion he privately opposes, just because it's patriotic. But somehow I doubt it. He's the best known American military figure, and he won't be able to hide from the media or international leaders. He has his own credibility and his effectiveness as a leader to worry about, if he's trying to defend what he doesn't believe in. That might work if he was more of a politician or less prominent. His choice would be between waffling and hiding, and either choice would tend to undermine the administration.

He could also focus all his power on providing American troops with what they need for an overwhelming military victory, discharging his duty to them. But can he then turn his back on the chaos that would ensue in the region, or the fate of the occupying force over time, when the slow accumulation of death is no longer fodder for the 24/7 media frenzy of the month? If asked about any other Bushie, the question would be rhetorical. But Powell might be able to translate his sense of duty from just the military he once commanded to the country he now serves.

America suffered a great trauma last September 11. Only a sober assessment of both threats and actions to neutralize the threats will make anyone safer from terrorism. The most terrifying aspect of the current leadership is its appearance of being both cynically manipulative and seriously out of control. For more than a year now, Osama bin Laden has been the devil incarnate, but he never gave the Bushies the satisfaction of becoming a visible bloody body. So they have to go after the ever reliable Saddam. At least they know where he lives.

America needs somebody to bring some sobriety to this White House. Maybe time will do the job, and the tide of opinion and protest. But just because this invasion is crazy in so many ways doesn't mean it won't happen. World War I was insane, and lots of people at the time knew it. This is how some wars start. So I expect that Colin Powell is going to be at the center of one of the more fateful backstage dramas of the next few months in Washington, DC.

Iraq and Roll

So far no one is saying it out loud, in the newspapers I read or the TV I've seen. But I imagine it's on the minds of many people, especially Americans, in this suspended moment before the war promoted by the President of the United States takes center stage: namely, we didn't really elect this guy.

Especially after the immense media concentration on the September 11 anniversary-much of it sincere, some clearly exploitive, but also some which seemed to be forced-we seem to have forgotten this other event that now looms so large in what is to come: the election of 2000.

We are being led, forced, on a course that defies historical standards and national ethics in modern times-- essentially a very radical course-by an administration that took power after losing the popular vote across the nation, and assumed office only by virtue of an extraordinary intervention by the Supreme Court, in a decision tainted by the evident conflict of interests of several Justices.

Its claim on being a democratically elected government is fragile at best. Yet this government is behaving with an arrogance that seems to lend credence to the proposition that it has contempt not only for the rest of the world but for the will of the American people. At the very least one would expect a certain political modesty from a government that came into power not quite by election, and not quite by a coup. (Though their arrogance tells me that in their minds, it was a coup.) But perhaps September 11 changed the equation of power-or perhaps it's just that they can count on the peculiar instant amnesia of this age.

Though no one now is connecting those dots, I'm sure future historians (if any) will do so in a matter of a few paragraphs. The first paragraph on George W. Bush will refer to his dubious claim to the presidency---that it came down to how to count or not count votes in a single state, where as result of error and designed suppression of votes, he carried the state and hence the election by a handful of actual votes---but only as validated by a split Supreme Court decision, defying both logic and law.

The second paragraph of this history will note that the G.W. Bush administration was dominated by the political cronies of the president's father, who spent their time out of government using their contacts to enrich themselves and large corporations, and blatantly represented those same interests when in government. It will note that the Bush administration was floundering until terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Then Bush made an off-the-cuff remark while standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center and saw immediately the makings of a political identity in the cheers of rescue workers that obviously surprised him. He could be the symbol of fighting back, even though he wasn't going to be doing any of the fighting, just as he could cry "Let's roll!" into Iraq, and then go take a nap. He could parlay that figurehead/talking head leadership into time-tested political manipulation based on patriotism and the fear of seeming not patriotic.

The third paragraph, I imagine, will be about the invasion of Iraq, and its tragic consequences. This history will perhaps note the puzzling lack of emotion and debate opposing this war until it was too late to stop it. It will note however that most of what then happened was foreseen at least in outline (columnists like Molly Ivins, Robert Scheer, and locally in San Francisco, Jon Carroll and Rob Morse, have been remarkably clear.)

These historians will fill in the details of the ensuing chaos and violent death in the Gulf region and the Middle East, the chaos and strife spreading to various political and economic alliances. This history will note the damage to the world economy, weakening it at a time when it needed to be strong to cope with the changes slowly but surely taking hold as consequences of the climate crisis. It will note the costs on life in the United States of more economic hardship and a greater siege mentality against real and imagined threats-with one of the real threats being an increasingly intrusive, powerful and arrogant police state government.

We owe all of this partly to the blindness of Americans who fell for the simplistic idea that it did not matter if Bush or Gore won the 2000 election. That Bush and Gore are part of the same corrupt political system is true, and has consequences. But that doesn't deny their differences, and one or the other was going to be president.

We reap the whirlwind of this failure to understand the differences between these two men, and the people they bring into power. Millions of Americans voted on small differences. If you can believe the media conventional wisdom, many voted for Bush because he seemed like a nice guy, not as stiff as Gore. This extraordinarily stupid test for presidential fitness was granted legitimacy by media's failure to even question it-but then how could many TV "news" personalities challenge the wisdom of judging on nice guy appearances when they owe their jobs to the same standards.

The Bush presidency is leading America and the world to a disastrous twenty-first century in three interlocking ways: internationally, by arrogance and war; domestically, by bankrupting the federal government on tax breaks for the wealthy; and globally, by ignoring global heating and other environmental threats.

The agenda behind all of this is pretty clear: favor entrenched corporate interests, keep the oppressed people of the world in control through force, and keep the American people scared: scared for their safety and their country, so they will support Bush and the Republican establishment from now until doomsday, and scared for their own livelihoods so they won't rock the boat, so they will keep fighting each other for crumbs, with their nose to the grindstone and nothing in their heads but dreams of sudden wealth and celebrity.

We can see the consequences of those apparently small differences between Bush and Gore and between these two parties pretty clearly now. Though most Democrats are too scared of appearing unpatriotic to do more than stutter, at least Al Gore has spoken forthrightly about the folly and arrogance of the Bush administration's march towards war, and its foreign policy pretensions that would make the Roman Empire jealous, especially as it was falling.

We can hear echoes of Gore's campaign call to fight for middle class Americans who are being lacerated now, and who will have their futures mortgaged by Bush war and tax policies. That call was ridiculed by the wealthy and wannabe-wealthy minions of the media, and disbelieved by the Naderites. It's not hard to justify the Naderite skepticism or even cynicism, but it's also not hard to see where the important lines of difference are. Some are large, like the tax cut that Gore never would have proposed or allowed to become law.

Other differences may seem smaller, but loom as large. Clearly, Gore would talk differently on global heating and other environmental matters, though even if he had become president, environmentalists would have had to keep the pressure on to get real change. But at least they wouldn't have to spend such an immense amount and proportion of energy and resources to even get the climate crisis on the table.

And here's an apparently small but very real difference. It isn't just that Gore is a lot smarter than Bush (though incredibly this was held against him much of the time) but that he respects the process and conclusion of science and thought. Intellectual integrity is something Gore actually understands. So we would not be seeing the folly now being perpetrated in Washington of replacing scientists with political and corporate hacks at EPA and on the federal scientific advisory boards to the CDC, the FDA and other agencies charged with health and safety. It's a virtual certainty that at some point people will get sick and die because of these decisions. With the challenges inevitably ahead-the health impact of global heating alone is going to be monstrous---this small act may turn out to be among the most consequential, just as important as that handful of votes in Florida.

At this moment it may seem pointless to revisit the 2000 election, but even beyond the need to understand history or be condemned to idiotically repeat it, there is in this moment, at least for me, the feeling that something truly terrible was set in motion, not just in September 2001 but in November 2000.

The fall of western civilization, the beginning of the end of humanity's hegemony on the planet---if you've been paying attention for the past few years, these things are not only being discussed as real possibilities, in some quarters they are virtual clichés. That western civilization is about to collapse is something like an assumption. The premise that humanity and perhaps all life on earth is in real peril in this century is also a kind of starting point for discussions among respectable scientists and knowledgeable observers.

A feature of collapse in its early stages, and perhaps even when it is well underway, is likely to be that not many people notice. They continue to judge problems in the same narrow frameworks; they fail to "connect the dots" in today's favorite cliché.

There was an article in The New Yorker a few years back that caught my eye, called "The Tipping Point." The author expanded it into a book I found disappointing, because I believe he missed the obvious ramifications of the theory on important issues. The Tipping Point theory sounds like systems theory I heard discussed some years ago. It says that there is a particular point in change-the tipping point-when the change can no longer be reversed until it plays itself out. The behavior of epidemics is an example.

The tipping point of the twenty-first century may very well turn out to be the moment American forces invade Iraq. If so, and it tips over this extraordinarily complex and fragile house of cards until it all falls down, there may not be future historians to record any of this. But if there are, my guess is that of all the dates they rank in significance from the first years of this century, September 11---for all its horror and importance--will turn out to be no greater than a close third.

On the Bookshelf: Self Beyond Help

by Theron Dash

1. Chicken Shit For the Soul
A compendium of real easy and very minor changes in attitude and behavior-or maybe just in home decoration-that won't cause you any pain or effort, or actually change much. You'll feel better, but not for long. Then you'll need to buy another one of these books, such as...

2. Simplistic Abundance
Color-coordinated volumes of homilies. Collect them all! (Note: if you can find that rare Vol. 12 in fuscia, it's worth clobbering somebody at the yard sale to get it!)

3. I'm OK, You're Poor by Jack Welsh.
The ex-CEO of GE explains why people who don't have golden parachutes as big as the Ritz and acronyms associated with their names are pathetic losers.

4. Winning Through Interrogation
Report on the Bush administration approach to intelligence gathering, which is to save needless effort and cut costs by relying on putting people in prison and getting them fired so the FBI and CIA can spend time questioning people instead of wasting their time gathering and evaluating data, which they've shown they are not too good at anyway. Why go out looking for information when you can force the information to come to you? Includes evaluation of torture services offered by third party countries.

5. Be Here Whenever
The Whatever Generation's guide to enlightenment, or not.

6. Get With the Pogrom
An unbiased guide to persecuting your favorite designated enemy group, foreign or domestic. Includes the latest Internet techniques, though the revival of old-fashioned war on the Devil is given its due, too.

Today's dialogue comes to you live from The Drink & Think, the frequent home of American Samizat and meetingplace of the Dash brothers. Located in the Rue Morgue Mall.

PHINEAS DASH: So, what's it all about, 9/11? What is there to say about it a year later?

CHRISTOPHER DASH: Last time I flew I had to remove my belt, jacket and shoes, and stand on a piece of carpet that had two footprints burned into it. I had to open my sealed bottle of water and take a sip in front of the security guard. Later, when I was entering a public building in Washington, D.C., an art museum in the Smithsonian, I was opening my backpack for the security guard to inspect. I took out my bottle of water and was about to take a sip---it was hot outside and I was thirsty---when the security guard told me I wasn't allowed to drink from a bottle inside the building.

THERON DASH: Exactly. Power plus fear plus bureaucracy equals intense absurdity. Of which this is a small example. Nothing like, say, attacking Iraq. But indicative.

CHRISTOPHER: Yes, but for the largest number of people this has been the biggest effect of 9/11 so far. It has made air travel, which was already deteriorating, an experience in madness.

PHINEAS: Air travel is on the brink of collapse. Think of what happens to the economy then.

CHRISTOPHER: I can remember when flying was pleasant. Or even when it was fun to go no-frills. People's Express. They had style when they started out. I was on a flight once, packed to the gills with people giddy over saving so much money, when the announcement came over the p.a. "Passengers on the right side of the aircraft can look to the left and see the passengers on the left side of the aircraft." Later when it got really big it wasn't so much fun. But they were always overbooked and I got so many free tickets by volunteering to be bumped on flights coming home that I saw half the continent for free. But for efficient and very comfortable flights, nothing beat Air Canada.

PHINEAS: Even Air Canada isn't so great now, but it suggests what really needs to be done. Air travel is so essential that the government is going to wind up bailing out some of these airlines, but that money isn't going to improve them, just keep them going. What we really need is a government funded airline.

THERON: Air America? Run by the CIA?

PHINEAS: No, run by TWA, the old TWA. Run by airline professionals, but run as a public utility. Government built the interstate highways, it subsidies rail travel, so supporting air travel is justifiable. And if the federal government paid for an airline with quality service and reasonable fares, maybe private airlines would find ways to improve their service and fares. A single national airline run like Air Canada used to be can coexist with private airlines just like Air Canada and other state-run airlines coexisted with commercial airlines. Plus a certain minimum amount of available air travel would be guaranteed. Somebody has to do something about the current chaos.

THERON: As much as I thrive on chaos, I'm inclined to agree. Did you read about that woman, the environmental activist, who was banned from flying because somebody didn't like her politics? And how she was abused with impunity by a single soldier, maybe not even regular army, but with more authority than anyone else at the airport? All the really loose accusations that carried really heavy penalties? That's chaos plus fear plus power, minus rights.

PHINEAS: We all realize what a serious trauma 9-11 was. But there hasn't been another airliner problem since then, and I'll go out on limb to say it's real unlikely there will be.

CHRISTOPHER: You went out on that limb on 9-12, as I recall. And of course it makes sense that they wouldn't expect to get away with using airliners again. Surprise was the essence of it.

PHINEAS: Heightened security is sensible. But it's gotten out of hand. Along with the rest of the Bushfellows agenda.

THERON: It's also taken a year to get federally employed security people as inspectors at airports. Yet some of them are saying that their training consisted of maybe fifteen minutes. That doesn't bode well for your national airline, Phin. Maybe we should just give the franchise to Air Canada.

3rd Rails
1

stand up for me
somebody green and filthy
noises in the arc of songs
blasé and fruitful, recondite in their
pleasure and fortunate in gloom
all risible features are unclothed
in this tentacle forbidden rose
implanted garden of rails.

2

through the veiled window of her grounded vacuum
did you flirt or munch the frail potatoes?
arguments on this point reverberate
through glass knives echoing in forbidden ruins
History will not record, it will regurgitate.

3

smooth is as smooth does
flip reason and grouse about
the griddle. Heed the ringing,
ignore the flume. Nobody there
there.
It's all noise.
The only salvation
is song.

not much
to look at

or hold on
to

nothing
to eat

--Gabriel Dash

The Back to School Issue
by Phineas Dash

Colleges are killing themselves. They are killing their students by treating them as "customers," selling them frills and momentary thrills, and teaching them all the wrong lessons about the world as well as almost nothing about acquiring and using knowledge. They are killing their faculty members with cost-cutting and the imposition of business bureaucracy standards, so that the faculty is sandwiched in between the manufactured meetings, budgets, and absurd rules of the corporate-minded administration, and the me-first, the customer is always right, entertain me or get a bad evaluation (i.e. fired) blackmail of students.

The system is now firmly established as another process in the manufacturing of ignorance. Ignorant people are pliable people, gullible and easily manipulated. As workers, you can scare them and trick them into dutifully giving their all, giving everything they've got-their time, talent, energy and faith--for peanuts. As customers, you can sell them anything.

The college machine holds young people hostage with huge loan payments so they'll be cooperative workers. That takes care of those young dissenters. The college machine is yet another part of the process that turns people into worker/consumers, and the citizenry into niche markets.

The cynicism behind even the best that colleges offer is stunning. Student writers, visual and theatre artists, for example, get individual attention, they get productions and shows and the use of often superior facilities. The vast majority of them will never have it so good ever again. They will not find theatre organizations or editors who will fawn over their every word or gesture, once they've stopped paying for that kind of attention.

The college education I got didn't prepare me for the real world of work, but it never really pretended to. Colleges today pretend they are practical places but that's massive denial, when it isn't just plain cynical. They aren't insisting that students learn skills they'll need even if that is a painful process. The business model demands that the customer be happy at the moment of purchase, and that's when the bargain ends. Responsible adults should know from their own lives that the popular teachers weren't necessarily the ones who taught them what turned out to be most important. In fact the most important skills and ideas sink in so deep that you probably won't even remember how you learned them, or who you learned them from.

As a student, I agitated for student evaluations of teachers. It never dawned on me that administrators and faculties would abrogate their responsibilities by making student evaluations the gospel on teaching effectiveness. But that's what they've done, and that's why grades are fundamentally dishonest now, everyone knows this, and the system is corrupt from top to bottom.

FLIGHT OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL STORK
by Gabriel Dash

The cornflakes of memory
are like the
airplanes of lamentation,
neither are they obvious
or scant.
They might be orphans,
the orifice of artifice,
orphic, oracular and orange.

Steadfast at last
in the virtue of green distances,
or fog embracing time’s
wounded tonsils. This reverence
becomes you.
The text is not toxic
nor fleshed code.
It is blue,
uneasy, flighty,
unfinished, feared.

They stood in the breach
between civility and purpose,
gauging whether this notion or
any notion could peal
prettily, anyway.

Don’t hold it
against them. Cold
makes cold.
That aching drink
could talk.

Is free will predetermined?
You can’t say that on the radio!
Ivy climbs the cop’s umbrella.
This lack of something that’s not
there is reminiscent
of smeared paint.
Someday tourists will come.

Sorry, we don’t listen to
dead Romans now
roaming through whistles
winding
nor do we attend to echoes
of flown ancients
timeless in the earth
and the trembling they delivered
as rooted wisdom
to the eighth sea.

Now spasms
of gilded tendrils
deep fingered, are silent dreaming
a solitary song.
The captive lamp in earnest
volume is like
the forged passenger.
The mother ship.
The parent company.

Fly now
bundle

The Only Game...

by Phineas Dash

Something has fundamentally changed in American business, and therefore in American life. And until we come to grips with this change, a lot that is currently going wrong is going to keep edging and falling towards disaster.

The big fundamental change is the result of many other changes, some large and some small, some obviously related and some apparently unrelated, that have been going on in full view while nobody was looking, since the 1980s.

Despite the trumpeted reliance of the new American economy on small business and entrepreneurs, the corporation has gotten larger and larger, and more and more dominant. They moved aggressively into services, and combined product and services and distribution. Mergers and buyouts, consolidations, global expansion, have all met with friendly de-regulation and privatization. Then computerization, the electronic information revolution.

All those "ions" are now the air we breathe, in more ways than one.
There are other factors, too, involving the stock market and the dividing of the middle class, but let's stop there. The resulting basic change is a new relationship between the stock market and the corporation. But that apparently simple shift has changed everything.

The resulting change is this: corporation CEOs now have no other real responsibility but to increase the value of the company's stock.
Sounds innocent enough perhaps. But think about those fatal, fateful words: no other real responsibility.

So when your average $20 million a year corporate CEOs go to work, what---and who---do they have to worry about?

CEOs don't have to worry about employees---they are dispensable, everyone apparently accepts that. The old bargain that the company looks out for the welfare of its people, and its people are loyal to the company, is no longer even an often-violated standard.

In fact, CEOS can more easily increase stock value by axing employees than by motivating them. It turns out that all the consultants and retreats, all the nomenclature changes naming employees "associates" and "stakeholders" is just so much tap-dancing on their graves.

CEOs don't have to worry about the public. Here in California, Enron essentially controlled our electricity, which means they controlled just about everything. Electricity used to be a public utility, because it was something that this functioning society and the individuals within it needed to have. It's just about as important as blood. Not only did de-regulation and privatization weaken public control over functions necessary to the public good, but the reigning philosophy absolved powerful corporations from worrying about the public good they'd assumed responsibility for.

The public interest includes all private interests, but since the 1980s our culture has been persuaded of the opposite, that serving a lot of private interests adds up to serving the public interest. As it turns out, it actually serves a very small number of private interests. Namely, the CEOs and possibly their kiss-kiss boards of directors.

CEOs don't generally have to worry about getting caught cheating, because corporations and the rich people they produce have had the government in their pockets for long enough to render powerless what regulatory agencies still exist. Government has been friendly to corporations because corporations put their friends in the government. In the latest national "election", they managed to put themselves atop the federal government.

CEOs don't even have to worry about what used to be the most basic, most Republican of all business concerns: profits. Costs, product and profits are all secondary. In the short term---the only term that counts---they're all just numbers anyway, and it turns out they can be rather easily manipulated one way or another at the right moment to increase stock value.

So what's left for the CEO to worry about? For a few precious moments of a few predictably special hours on a few designated days, the value of the company's stock. And how much of it the CEOs own, and how fast they can get rid of it before the card house collapses.

The bottom line (which, by the way entered our everyday language as the default expression for "the basic conclusion" when all this started in the 1980s) is that all CEOs have to worry about is getting rich.

And that's all that quite a few of them did worry about. And they got rich, beyond all reason.

The stock market plunge and all the lost retirement funds is only one predictable result of what's been happening in the last five years or so. The cost to the society as a whole is stupendous. When a very, very few profit so greatly, it's almost inevitable that many, many will suffer tremendously.

Sending a few CEOs to jail may temporarily slake a thirst for vengeance, but it's an ultimately futile and irrelevant gesture. Most of what CEOs and their co-dependents do to shred this society is at least marginally legal.

Someone who is a lot better at math than I am has figured out that to make as much money as one CEO took home in a single year (namely the $102 million pocketed by the CEO of Green Tree Financial Corporation) it would take a minimum wage worker-say the woman who takes care of your kids when you're at work, or the guy who pushes your mother's wheelchair in her "facility"-about 7500 years. That's seven thousand and five hundred years.

That probably means that this one CEO will make more in twelve months than that person, her parents, his grandparents, and their ancestors back to the Crusades managed to earn all of their lives put together. Several times more, probably.

What the impact of knowing this in your bones might do is worth a column in itself. For the moment let's stick with these two points: First, the gap between the very rich and most people is more than a matter of numbers. It creates needless suffering and tragedies every minute of every day, for people who are working themselves to death and taking the next generation down with them, who can't get the medical care they need, who can never feel secure because corporations can destroy what little they have at any moment.

Second, this system works only in the very short term, and possibly (if you're a devoted Darwinian) over the very long term.
But our economy and our society don't work in either of those time frames. They work in patterns of years and lifetimes and generations. Social and economic institutions depend on the confidence people have in them every day, as a result of these years and lifetimes and generations.

The economy, the society, may look as automatic as a machine, but in fact they involve a lot of cooperation that must operate consistently, because when cooperation is withdrawn the system falters. In ways we aren't quite conscious of most of the time, that cooperation and consensus and confidence must be renewed every day.

Everything social depends on many small social contracts, some stated and backed by rules and laws, and others just as important that are implied, suggested by symbols and renewed by behavior.

That's why I believe the crisis of confidence we're seeing is deeper and broader than the anger and fear that resulted in recent stock market plunges.

The solution must also be deep and broad, and it will involve reestablishing some old values and establishing new interpretations of what constitutes justice and fairness.

I do have a suggestion on how to start. Instead of putting a few people in jail, take their money. Not a little. Not some of it. All of it.

Then somehow, some way, there have to be real limits on how much money anybody in the corporate hierarchy can extract from it.

For this crisis does make it possible to ask out loud a question that some of us have quietly swallowed for years: why do those people need all that money? How can this society, this economy, really afford that?

How is it possible that in a single year a few individuals can make more money than the vast majority of a company's employees could hope to make in a lifetime, collectively---plus the lifetime earnings of all their family, their parents and grandparents and several generations beyond, put together? What kind of society is possible when that's a normal state of affairs?

And do we really believe that a sound economy can be sustained with so much wealth in so few hands---and in so few apparently selfish hands? A sound economy, as we're always re-learning, depends on a sound society.

I love it when these people respond to the question of why they try to make more money when they are already incredibly rich. It's not the money, they say, it's just a way of keeping score. Well, it's time for them to find another way.

Like how many pensions your company finances without gambling your employees' retirement away on the stock market. Like how much money you put into campaigns for universal health care and to combat the climate crisis. Even go back to some old-fashioned standards, like how many hospitals and schools and libraries you build. Not how many sports arenas you get temporarily named after your company.

The idea that the genius of the day is a CEO who can make the stock price go up, regardless of any other consideration, and regardless of how many people are hurt---including how many ecosystems are destroyed, how many societies are oppressed and impoverished, and distant wars encouraged---has always has the smell of self-destructiveness about it, among other odors.

That these CEOs cart off the world's wealth while daycare workers and nurses can't make a living, and millions of hard-working people around the world are heartlessly manipulated and horrifyingly poor, has been obscene for a long time, too.

Let's not pretend this is exclusively the responsibility of those awful CEOs. At least the upper third of the middle class was perfectly willing to let it all go on as long as they got a piece of the action. The people who played the stock market game and averted their eyes from all this for their own profit bear some responsibility for this mess as well.

That their anger at being cheated is likely augmented with guilt probably contributed to the ferocity of response. Now that the implicit bargain with the CEOs they trusted to make them money turned out to be a scam, it seems that getting the stock-buying public to withhold moral judgments (not to mention common sense) was just part of the con.

[Update: As I work on the "labels" for this site, many years after it began, I note for prosterity that for at least a year or more this was called "American Samizat," after the "underground" Samizdat literature circulated in eastern Europe when it was forbidden by the government. It took a long time for me to discover that (a) I'd mispelled it and (b) somebody else was using the title for his blog, but correctly spelled. I changed the blog title quickly to "American Dash," starring the Dash brothers, a device that kept me happily talking to myself for several more years. I briefly changed it again to "Scorched Mirth," after I started a new 'portal' blog with a more forward-looking agenda, called Dreaming Up Daily. But I couldn't maintain the satiric tone and I was postings less and less. So now--about five years after this first post--I mostly cross-post appropriate screeds from other blogs, though now as I review these early entrys, I'm inspired to maybe revive the Dash Brothers and see what they're like now...]


There are many reasons a writer or a piece of writing doesn't get published.
Political censorship.
Commercial censorship.
Because the piece of writing isn't very good.

We will ignore all of those reasons at AMERICAN SAMIZAT.

We don't intend to publish stuff we know is bad, but our standards may be warped, because it's our stuff. So what. We'll live with that possibility, in order to make sure we aren't subjecting ourselves to the first two reasons:censorship.

Because of political censorship, writers in the Soviet Union circulated "Samizat" or self-published, do-it-yourself pages. "Samizat" was apparently a parody of the Gosizdat, the state publishers.

Now with the Internet and the Blogger technology, American Samizat is online.

In America, political censorship is more subtle than state control. It is closely allied with commercial censorship, since corporations wield the greatest political power.

In America, you don't hear dissenting voices on television, not because of their views (of course not) but because they don't draw an audience. Right wing radical radio talk shows excite the rabid rabble. Coincidentally, their agenda serves corporate power.

In America, you don't hear or see the real thinkers, the serious people, on television or read them in the daily press. Judging from TV, there is not a single serious person with challenging ideas in psychology, ecology, philosophy, social and cultural analysis, and few with anything to say about the arts except thumbs up or down.

Even 30 years ago, there were authentic public intellectuals that the public knew. Not any more. Now public intellectuals are people like Bill Bennett, a right wing poster boy with a bevy of little elves who write his books.

In America, you don't see or hear very many real artists, real poets, very often. These days you seldom see or hear or read real journalists. A few columnists, a few comedians and comic strip authors, that's about all there is of any value in the mass market.

Good books however are heroically written and some are published. A few good movies are made and some are even seen here and there. We need to bring attention to these. We need critique, we need satire and dissent, but we also need hope and praise and love.

We need to raise the level of comment and discussion of our common culture and its artifacts. America and the West in general are being dumbed down, and it's not accidental. Stupid people don't know how to do anything except work and buy the things they're supposed to buy.

All forms of censorship are insidious, commercial censorship especially, because it's invisible. Nobody signs petitions or organizes demonstration on behalf of a victim of commercial censorship. Nobody knows how.

Political and commercial censorship foster the worst kind of censorship of all: self-censorship. The work that never gets written honestly because the writer has lost heart.

We at American Samizat are all professional writers. We are all citizens of the United States, and everything we write, every word we breathe into print or utter, every song we sing and every line we invent, are fully protected by copyright. Anyone may read what we post, but no one may steal our work. The corporations have stolen our time and deformed our work long enough. We aren't going to let them or anyone else stop us or steal from us.

We are professionals, but not much of our most honest work gets out of the room of its making. We believe in quality of work, in artistry, in working hard to communicate, inspire and delight. But too much of our work is compromised by the demands of others and their stated and hidden agendas. We want to shape and rewrite and edit our own work, not censor it.

We use pseudonyms. But not always. You may see our work elsewhere, if we're lucky, but it won't always be under the same name. We however will always know when our work is honestly acquired.

Here at American Samizat the Brothers Dash will post their thoughts, and their writings of all kinds-essays, articles, satire, reviews, poetry, drama, fiction. They will be political, cultural, intellectual, personal. Since we are borrowing the space and good graces of our host, we will sometimes let him post something of his own.

None of us is making any money right now. We don't know from day to day how much longer we can keep writing. Some of us (at least) aren't so young anymore. America is unforgiving about age and about illness and about money. One or all of us could disappear at any moment. So every post will be precious to us.

We have no idea if anyone will read us. But we do know that it will now be possible. Despite the fact that a couple of us have had to work in advertising and public relations from time to time, we are totally terrible at promoting ourselves. One of us writes grants, but he has never written a successful grant for himself. His grants have brought in thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for others. But he can't get a dime for himself. So it goes.

If you drop in on American Samizat from time to time, you will get to know us better, and we hope you will have a good time---feel your synapses snap and sizzle, your funnybone quiver, with some occasional exercise for your tear ducts. Welcome.

AMERICAN SAMIZAT:
The Brothers Dash: Christopher, Morgan, Theron, Gabriel and Phineas.
Other family members may chime in from time to time, as well as our host.