The ill logic of the lower classes

Posted on December 29, 2013 by oddmanout215

Lone marsh tree

It’s the Eighth Day After the Solstice, and I’m back at the shack after checking up on my old house, which stopped feeling homey after a tree fell on it last year. Some of my old neighbors are doing OK, judging by the number of houses with Christmas decorations. Some of the those who weren’t doing OK have died. Others — the ones who, because of joblessness or a catastrophe, couldn’t make their mortgage payments — have simply disappeared.

On my way back to the swamp I ran into one of the disappeared — a big, blustery guy who used to remind me of a circus strong man, probably because of the striped tank tops he wore in the summer. Today he was wearing dark glasses and a ratty coat with a big hood, and he seemed about four inches shorter, but I recognized him and said hello as we crossed paths on the sidewalk. He returned my hello but didn’t stop walking. I got the impression he was homeless but I can’t be sure, because I didn’t stop walking either.

At the shack I asked Swamp Rabbit, an amateur psychotherapist as well as a closet bibliophile, why my former neighbor and I had shied away from each other. He spit into the Tinicum swamp and said, “Your ex-neighbor feels like a bum. He’d feel even more like a bum talking to you, because you knew him when he had a house. And I reckon you didn’t want him to know you feel like a bum, too.”

I reminded the rabbit that I’m a fiction writer, not a bum. He asked me what the difference was. It was noon, but he already smelled like he’d finished off a bottle.

I said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve calling me a bum, all you do is drink Wild Turkey and spit in the swamp.”

“Think about it,” he replied. “It ain’t just them hyper-capitalists and their lap dogs in Congress that blame poor people for being poor. The poors blame themselves. They don’t even raise hell when food stamps get cut and unemployment benefits get killed after six months. If they do raise hell, it’s agin each other.”

“You don’t understand the fear, you dumb rodent. I’m all for raising hell, like I said last week, but I have to be careful. The New Deal is done, the rich have the whip hand until things change again.”

I read him the tail end of a column by Paul Krugman:

Too many Americans currently live in a climate of economic fear. There are many steps that we can take to end that state of affairs, but the most important is to put jobs back on the agenda.

The rabbit twitched his nose and chuckled. “Whose agenda? Jobs are on your agenda if you’re jobless, but they ain’t if you’re in the owner class. The owners don’t need more workers, they’re making bigger profits without them. Who’s gonna make them start hiring?”

I threw one of his empty bottles at him. It’s annoying when the varmint makes more sense than that guy in The New York Times.

Posted in Congress, down and out, economic collapse, fiction, globalization, humor, life in the big city, mainstream media, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Karl Marx gets a makeover

Posted on December 23, 2013 by oddmanout215

Just for a laugh, I read aloud from a Guardian UK article in which David Simon expressed qualified approval of some Marxist ideas. Sure enough, my friend Swamp Rabbit called me a commie before I was halfway through the piece.

Simon is the fellow whose well-regarded TV series The Wire depicted life in the other America, the one where there is no law and order and no tangible connections to the so-called economic recovery that we hear about in mainstream news reports. The Guardian article, an edited transcription of a talk Simon gave in Australia, made plain what was implicit in The Wire — that the growing divide between rich and poor is a consequence of policies forged by free-market zealots who decided it was safe to throw the poor under the bus once it was clear that communism was no longer a viable threat to the status quo.

“Big words and ideas,” said Swamp Rabbit, who used to be a commie himself. He waved his old, battered copy of Marx’s Capital: Volume I and added, “We was hopin’ for heaven on earth, but all we got was Joe Stalin.”

But Simon doesn’t say Marx’s communist dream wasn’t deeply flawed; he merely reminds us that Marx, who became the butt of countless jokes when communism failed, was right about unbridled capitalism:

…Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.

It’s pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don’t let it work entirely. And that’s a hard idea to think – that there isn’t one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we’ve dug for ourselves. But man, we’ve dug a mess…

Don’t let capitalism “work entirely” or you end up with a plutocracy, in which the wealthy thrive at record rates while the earning power of the middle class dwindles and the poor are deep-sixed. In which corrupt Democrats join Republicans in dismantling the New Deal, a force for change that involved a pragmatic mix of ideas meant to serve egalitarian ends, the first of which was to put people back to work. The overall goal was the triumph of social democracy.

Not so in our time. As economist Dean Baker recently noted, “At the moment, no prominent politician in national politics is arguing the case for a government budget that could bring the economy anywhere near to full employment.”

“That’s because the politicians are all owned by the skunks who profit by putting people out of work,” the rabbit said. “It don’t take no Karl Marx to figure that out.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but if we don’t start pushing back against the skunks, like Marx did, then the joke’s on us.”

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, globalization, history, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A ‘Blue Xmas’ with Miles

Posted on December 16, 2013 by oddmanout215

Miles Davis at his most demented coolest, with Wayne Shorter (sounds more like John Coltrane) on tenor and lyricist/singer Bob Dorough, the vocal equivalent of a funhouse mirror. (You might want to smash the mirror before the song is over.)

Full title: “Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern).” Cool, daddy-o.

Footnote: Thank you, Hobson Tarrant, wherever you are, for your “pipecleaner-based’ animation.

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The curious case of the two Barack Obamas

Posted on December 10, 2013 by oddmanout215

My friend Swamp Rabbit laughed all week at the speech in which the president, in typically stirring style, called for better treatment of low-wage workers:

Barack Obama warned that a “relentless, decades-long trend” of growing inequality and social immobility posed a fundamental threat to the American dream on Wednesday, throwing his support behind a grassroots movement to address chronically low wages across the US.

Attempting to regain the political momentum after a calamitous two months in which his healthcare reforms were plagued by website failures, the president said reversing the growing gap between rich and poor was “the defining challenge of our time…”

Unfortunately, this is the same president with the sneaky, pro-corporate agenda described Sunday in this report:

The Obama administration appears to have almost no international support for controversial new trade standards that would grant radical new political powers to corporations, increase the cost of prescription medications and restrict bank regulation, according to two internal memos obtained by The Huffington Post.

The memos, which come from a government involved in the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade negotiations, detail continued disputes in the talks over the deal…

TPP, which critics often refer to as NAFTA on steroids, would deal another major blow to future attempts by progressives to cut big banks and mega-corporations down to size, and to stop the off-shoring of American jobs. One thing TPP definitely would not do is encourage corporate kingpins to provide wages that keep pace with the cost of living.

So is Obama using pro-workers rhetoric to distract us from his effort to “fast-track” an agreement that would leave workers with even less clout than they have now? Or does he really believe that a minimum-wage increase would compensate for the lost jobs and the decrease in workers’ bargaining power that would inevitably result from the passage of TPP?

It’s like asking if he’s grossly corrupt or amazingly naive. Swamp Rabbit thinks he’s both.

“A con man believes his own con when he’s in the middle of trying to con you,” the rabbit said. “Especially a con man who talks as good as Obama.”

One thing’s for sure: Another “challenge of our time,” just as defining as closing the income gap, is to dismantle the machine that, one election cycle after another, cranks out nothing but corporate-owned candidates for high office.

Posted in campaign finance reform, globalization, mainstream media, Obama, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

‘Island of Sirens’

Posted on December 7, 2013 by oddmanout215

December is a tough time to live in a swamp. The trees are bare and the clouds so low you can almost jump up and touch them. You need music to stop the highway noise. Today I put on “Island of Sirens” for my friend the swamp rabbit. We commiserated.

“It’s one of them cautionary tales,” the rabbit said, breaking the seal on a Wild Turkey bottle. “Keep your eyes on the prize. Don’t let some siren sing you something so sweet you wanna drop anchor and hear more.”

I watched him guzzle and said, “It’s just a song. It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.”

“It’s a Homer story,” he insisted. “Ulysses tempted by forbidden fruit.”

The rabbit must have slogged through a translation of The Odyssey back in the day. Or he heard Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses.”

“Whatever you say,” I said. “But I think you’ve got the sirens mixed up with Circe.”

“Don’t make no difference. The point is, don’t get off the boat.”

“Or the wagon,” I said, eyeing his half-empty bottle. “You might not be able to get back on.”

Footnote: “Island of Sirens” is by the Philly-based band Nicos Gun. It will be featured on their soon-to-be-released album Dream Vacation.

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Schumer’s in a bubble with the banksters

Posted on December 5, 2013 by oddmanout215

From New Republic’s interview with New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who, in a weasel-y way, links Sen. Elizabeth Warren with “left-wing blogs”:

CS: …You’ve got to look at the effect on average folks. The vast majority of the people employed by Wall Street are the secretary who goes in to work on the Long Island Rail Road, who makes fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year. I’m not saying Elizabeth does this, but there are some on the far left who just have a visceral hatred of Wall Street. It’s counterproductive.
IC: You don’t think Elizabeth Warren makes a villain out of Wall Street?
CS: I am just going to leave it at what I said.
IC: Forget Warren then. Is this a problem for your party?
CS: You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti–Wall Street. It’s not the right way to be.
IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?
CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.

Schumer’s been living in a bubble with the banksters for too long, or he’d know contempt for the Wall Street gang extends far beyond the “far left” faction of the Democratic Party. I don’t think today’s Democratic Party even has a far left. What Schumer is calling the far left would have been considered slightly left-of-center in 1964, or centrist in 1936.

But give Schumer credit for reminding us of the upcoming fight for control of the Democratic Party. He’s in one corner with President Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the many other neoliberal Dems who have alienated the poor and the middle class, or what’s left of it. In the other corner are Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown and others in Congress who realize the party can’t energize its base, as they say, if it continues to help the rich grab an obscenely disproportionate amount of the national income, or if it continues to signal it might be on board with Republican demands for “entitlement” cuts.

The trick, of course, is to channel widespread contempt for an increasingly crooked elite into a movement for positive change, as opposed to something like the Tea Party, a movement of latter-day Know Nothings. If an old hustler like Schumer is upset, then those far-left crazies must be on the right track.

Footnote: Meanwhile, two writers from Third Way, a think tank where everyone thinks Wall Street and mega-corporations are terrific, slammed progressives and Warren in particular for not toeing the “centrist” line. Guess who sits on Third Way’s board of directors.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, mainstream media, Obama, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, weasel | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Turkey Day with Lucretius and Eric Cantor

Posted on November 29, 2013 by oddmanout215

It's two years old. No excuses. Read it.

It’s two years old. No excuses. Read it.

Last week I bought enough Wild Turkey to get Swamp Rabbit through the week, which left me just enough money to buy a real turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. But there’s no oven in my shack to bake a turkey, so I hitchhiked from the swamp to a convenience store to buy turkey hoagies instead. These turned out to be almost as expensive as a whole turkey but what the hell, it’s a holiday, let tomorrow take care of itself.

I have a stove for heat but the wood got wet last night, so we ate on the porch in feeble sunlight. I talked politics and the rabbit talked philosophy. Which means he lectured me on the wisdom of the poet Lucretius, who believed there is no afterlife and we therefore should squeeze as much pleasure as possible out of our limited lifespans. Not by overindulging our appetites, as the rabbit does, but rather by learning to appreciate the modest pleasures — a simple meal, a beautiful sunset, the company of good friends, and so on — that Lucretius believed are conducive to peace of mind.

“You ain’t never gonna have no peace of mind you keep worrying about them politicians,” he said. This was in reference to my ranting about Republican Congressman Eric Cantor, who wants to eliminate overtime pay for hourly workers.

“Cantor is special,” I replied. “A smug little weasel, always a smirk on his face, always pretending he’s doing working people a favor by ripping them off.”

The rabbit picked a red pepper from his hoagie and threw it in the swamp. “He’s doin’ what weasels do, Odd Man. You expectin’ divine justice or something?”

He thinks I’m a Platonist, maybe even a closet Christian. “I’m expecting earthly justice. Just because Lucretius was an atheist doesn’t mean he didn’t believe in justice.”

“Them’s nothin’ but words,” the rabbit said. “You’re like one of them frogs in the scum pond over there, croakin’ I’m special, I’m special. But you don’t even get no hourly wage, let alone OT.”

“That’s my point, you dumb rodent. Things get worse unless we fix them. The fact that the universe is indifferent is no excuse to behave like sheep. It’s a reason to behave like humans.”

The rabbit took a drink and said, “Humans, sheep, weasels — what’s the difference? We’ll all be dead in an eye blink.”

“I don’t get you,” I said. “Last week you said those people who work at Walmart should burn down the stores if they don’t get pay raises.”

“I changed my mind.” he said. “Last week I didn’t have no whisky.”

I shook my head. “The times are changing, rabbit. Humanism is back. Even the new pope is down with it.”

He said, “Tell that to Rush Limbaugh and his ditto-heads. Tell Eric Cantor.”

Footnote: In case you missed it, Pope Francis called the current brand of free-market capitalism “a new tyranny,” so Limbaugh called him a Marxist. I’d consider that a compliment.

Posted in arts, down and out, humor, mainstream media, philosophy, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Where were you when poverty became acceptable?

Posted on November 25, 2013 by oddmanout215

I’ve been thinking of JFK and of those hard-luck cases who work at places like McDonald’s and Walmart. (There but for the grace of God and the wearing of a clown uniform go I.)

Those who are old enough can recall exactly where they were 50 years ago when JFK was killed, but I’ll bet few of them recall when the fight to wipe out poverty, a key factor in Kennedy’s New Frontier spiel, turned into acceptance of the widening gap between rich and poor. No, worse than that — acceptance of the idea that government’s main job is to ensure the rich get richer at the expense of the rest of us.

The union-busting Ronald Reagan had something to do with it, but there wouldn’t have been a Reagan without the legions of working-class white voters who thought he had their interests at heart.

From Noam Chomsky, with my boldings:

We don’t use the term “working class” [in America] because it’s a taboo term. You’re supposed to say “middle class,” because it helps diminish the understanding that there’s a class war going on.

It’s true that there was a one-sided class war, and that’s because the other side hadn’t chosen to participate, so the union leadership had for years pursued a policy of making a compact with the corporations, in which their workers — say, the autoworkers —- would get certain benefits like fairly decent wages, health benefits and so on. But it wouldn’t engage the general class structure. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why Canada has a national health program and the United States doesn’t. The same unions on the other side of the border were calling for health care for everybody. Here they were calling for health care for themselves and they got it. Of course, it’s a compact with corporations that the corporations can break anytime they want, and by the 1970s they were planning to break it and we’ve seen what has happened since.

How’s that “compact with the corporations” working for you now, former labor unionists and ex-members of the middle class?

Footnote: The income gap between rich and poor has been growing since the 1970s. Ninety-five percent of the gains made in recovery from the 2008 crash have gone to the richest one percent of Americans.

Another: A recent piece by Peter Turchin attempts to put our era of growing economic inequality in historical perspective.

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, globalization, Occupy Wall Street, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Guess who pays for Walmart’s greed

Posted on November 19, 2013 by oddmanout215

walmart-always-low-wages

Maybe you saw the news item about the Walmart near Canton, Ohio that’s holding an in-house canned food drive “so associates in need can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner.” It seems retail employees at the monster store are so badly paid, many of them can’t afford to eat right. The solution? Employees who aren’t quite starving should feed employees who are.

I showed the last part of the story to Swamp Rabbit:

Walmart’s low wages come at a public cost. Because low-income workers still need housing and health care, taxpayers end up doling out millions in benefits to bridge the gap faced by many of the store’s retail workers. They have also led to strikes at Walmart stores from Seattle to Chicago to Los Angeles in recent weeks.

Even if the canned food drive successfully gathers enough to help out the Canton store’s low-income workers, many of them might not even be able to have the food on Thanksgiving. That’s because Walmart is one of a group of retailers that will open its stores for Black Friday sales beginning at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving afternoon.

The rabbit said, “Somebody oughta do somethin’ about them greedy Arkansas skunks who own that company. Somethin’ to git their attention.”

The funky old rodent is in a foul mood because the weather’s getting too cold for his hangover cure, which is to jump off the porch of my shotgun shack and swim a few laps around the swamp. He’s been pestering me to buy him a bottle of Wild Turkey to get him through Turkey Day.

I said, “Walmart is beyond satire. It’s like trying to satirize Nazi war crimes. Not even that New Yorker guy, Andy Borowitz, could pull it off.”

“I ain’t talkin’ about no satire,” he said. “Skunks care about action, not words. Them so-called associates oughta burn down one of them big, ugly stores. That’ll get their attention. Or walk out together and tell customers to shop somewhere else till Walmart pays a living wage.”

“That’s crazy talk,” I told him. “There aren’t enough employees willing to strike. When they fight back they don’t get a raise, they just get fired.”

He shrugged. “What’s worse, gettin’ fired or slow starvation? Ain’t nobody ever got nothin’ in this country without fightin’ for it. It don’t pay to be meek. It’s like my pappy used to say, the meeks shall inherit the dirt… You’re almost broke, Odd Man, you oughta know better.”

“You’re hopeless,” I said. “You’ve been in this swamp too long to know about the global economy. It’s too complicated for you to understand.”

He spit into the swamp. “Bullshit. The meeks can fight them skunks or they can kiss their asses. They can demand enough income to eat right or they can eat shit and die. What’s so complicated?”

It’s at moments like this that I usually buy him a bottle, which is what I did today. Anything to make him shut the f*ck up.

Footnote: Check out this story: “One Walmart’s Low Wages Could Cost Taxpayers $900,000 Per Year, House Dems Find.”

Another: Go here to help “associates” who were fired for fighting back.

Correction: OK, Stephen Colbert can satirize Walmart and make it funny, but he’s in a league of his own.

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, food, globalization, humor, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Poverty, straight up

Posted on November 18, 2013 by oddmanout215

From a blog called killermartinis, a stark account of living in poverty:

… Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6 AM, go to school (I have a full course load, but I only have to go to two in-person classes) then work, then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 12:30 AM, then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I’m in bed by 3. This isn’t every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork. Those nights I’m in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won’t be able to stay up the other nights because I’ll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an hour home from Job 2 so I can’t afford to be sleepy. I never get a day off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn’t leave you much room to think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and the next. Planning isn’t in the mix…

Read the whole piece. It’s as if someone said “Just the facts, ma’am,” and the blogger said OK, here goes, and what came out was an artfully plain explanation of why poverty often feels like quicksand — the more you struggle against it, the deeper it sucks you in.

The headline is “Why I make terrible decisions,” but the piece illustrates how hard it is not to make terrible decisions when none of your options is good. The best you can do is choose the option that seems less bad than the others. When you’re poor, this is the same thing as high-stakes gambling.

But it looks like the story might not end on a grim note. Another blogger apparently read the killermartinis post and said, damn, maybe I can help drag this woman onto solid ground. So the other blogger apparently established an online fund to help pay to have KM’s teeth fixed. Check it out.

And it seems KM’s “terrible decisions” piece may have caught the eye of a literary agent.

All of this seems to be on the up-and-up, although the cynic in me is always suspicious of Frank Capra-esque plot twists. Again, check it out.

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, The New Depression | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment