Opening day

Aroldos Chapman
Today is opening day, and as a loyal Cincinnati Reds fan, I take note that it is usually the only day of the season on which the team is tied for first place. I love the game of baseball, with all its nuances, intricacies and traditions. Outsiders find it boring, and I get that. It’s a pastoral sport, played by people who are not worried about a time clock. Its roots go far back beyond those of American football with its industrial era time clocks and smash-mouth demeanor.

A few years back, the Yankees were in the World Series and Alex Rodriguez (“A-Rod”), in trying to make it safely to first base on a ground ball, reached out with his hand and tried to jar the ball lose from the first baseman’s glove. It was considered a low act, and he was rightly scolded by the media and opposing fans. Imagine that, football fans – that’s about the extent of physical brutality in the sport of baseball.

The talent is superb – the ability to hit a ball thrown at you at 90+ mph in a fifth of a second rests on only a few. Owners would replace them tomorrow with lesser-paid players if they could, but the talent is rare enough to support the salary structure of baseball, ludicrous as it is.

The Reds have a young pitcher, Araldos Chapman, who is a Cuban defector. They signed him two years ago to a $30 million five-year deal. Last year was his breaking-in year. He was uncomfortable, and did not understand such concepts as “investment”, as in the team being concerned about his health for financial reasons. He would try to play injured, and the manager and pitching coach had to watch him carefully and convince him that his body was a temple. Chapman did not know who to trust, and did not understand American culture.

A full year later, he is more comfortable, and his delightful personality is coming out. He loves American fast food. He has formed friendships on the team and is learning English. The Reds’ GM, Walt Jocketty, is amazed at how well educated Chapman is – did he suppose, along with most Americans, that Cubans are merely the raw meat of a dictatorship?

Oh, yeah, last year Chapman threw a 105 mph fastball, the fastest pitch ever recorded in baseball history.

Who wrote the following?

1. Is it right for the president of the United States to order the assassination of any other person in the world, whatever the pretext may be?

2. Is it ethical for the president of the United States to order the torture of other human beings?

3. Should state terrorism be used by a country as powerful as the United States as an instrument to bring about peace on the planet?

4. Can the United States do without immigrants, who grow vegetables, fruits, almonds and other delicacies for US citizens? Who would sweep the streets, work as servants in the homes or do the worst and lowest-paid jobs?

5. Is the brain drain – the continuous theft of the best scientific and intellectual minds from poor countries – moral and justifiable?

A: Nelson Mandela
B: Jean-Bertrand Aristide
C: Fidel Castro
D: Barack Obama
E: Araldos Chapman
F: Michele Bachmann

The author of those words also notes that ““…today, the United States has nothing of the spirit behind the Philadelphia declaration of principles formulated by the 13 colonies that rebelled against English colonialism. Today, it is a gigantic empire that could never have been imagined by the country’s original founders.”

I see in baseball a passion for life expressed in pursuit of excellence and respect for others. It holds my interest even as I know that they are just throwing the ball, catching the ball. It is sullied in some ways – I don’t like that they feel the need to “honor America” with the national anthem before each game. Military flyovers at big games are an abomination. Regular season games, with the flashing lights and pre-recorded spontaneous enthusiasm, are often visual and aural pornogrpahy. But it otherwise preserves our best traditions.

We recently sat through four games in spring training in Arizona. During those games we chatted and laughed with perfect strangers, often losing track of events on the field. When the woman sitting next to me yelled “can of corn!”, I quizzed her on her basic knowledge of the game – turns out she also knew “chin music,” “hum batter,” “rope” and “parachute.” There was no anger expressed at events on the field, and of course every spectator possessed Superior Knowledge of the game over that of the the manager and general manager of each team.

It’s a splendid little game, made for the American way of life that existed before we became a military/industrial behemoth. Of course football is more popular by a hundred cubits. That doesn’t necessarily speak well of us.

Confused about Libya? Me too.

Perhaps a better man than we knew
It’s very difficult to understand events as they are playing out, as the people who drive public opinion don’t often tell us anything about the people who drive events. But the attack on Libya is showing a crack in the armor. The military is either forced to act or doing some “shock doctrine” opportunism. The propagandists are caught short, and are ad-libbing.

First, the attack was not planned. There was no demonization campaign, as with Saddam/Milosevic/Noreiga et al. They just went ahead and started bombing, meaning that they had no part in the uprising, and had no time to make up a good cover story. This took them by surprise. (“Them” is ubiquitous – the Pentagon, the White House, Wall Street, London … a very large group of powerful people.)

We don’t know who or what they are bombing. It’s a bit complicated, as with Iraq pre-2003, where they wanted Saddam Hussein in power to keep things in a state of “stability” until they could move in with the muscle. So we’re hearing now that they do not want regime change. They want their stability. They are, however, going after military hardware, which means that they do not want Ghaddafi to completely quell the uprising. And yet, given the anti-American sentiment that exists in Libya and just about every other Arab country, it is safe to assume that they do not want the rebellion to succeed.

Confused? Me too.

Watch out for them civilians!
The only thing I’ve heard out-of-the ordinary is a radio interview as I was working today, done locally in Denver, and with whom I do not know. But the guy being interviewed said that he thought that the the U.S. Southern Command is making a play to establish military bases in Africa. That has some legs, as bases and power projection behind most of what we are doing elsewhere.

Some are saying that Obama is merely imitating his idol, Ronald Reagan in doing this attack. This presumes that Obama has the power to make such decisions. If there is any power left in that office, there is no resolve to use it, so that it’s highly unlikely that Obama had anything to do with this decision. He’s just the ribbon cutter.

Oh, yeah – and now they are saying this is a NATO operation. That’s a ruse, of course, but there’s a real reason for it: They did not go through the motions of getting that perfunctory joint resolution from Congress authorizing the act. So it’s an illegal war. Hence, it’s “NATO’s idea.” But since NATO is submissive to the U.S., it’s window dressing.

I’ve come to believe two things during Obama’s presidency – one, that Gates at Defense and Geithner at Treasury were used as signals to the world, and Wall Street, respectively, that nothing had changed with his election, and two, that Rod Blagojevich is probably a decent guy, and that’s what cost him.

But who knows. In American politics, if good guys exist, they are like children, seen but not heard. But I can’t get over this feeling that Blagojevich was caught in the path of a steam roller.

… Oh yeah, almost forgot … human rights. Let me think about that … no, they don’t care about that. Must be something else.

The exclusion principle

There are no “free markets.” Some of us know this, but the phrase is so clever! What is better than to be free? By equating their market capitalism with more basic freedoms, like speech, religion, and privacy, it becomes one of our founding principles. But it was never meant to be such.

The essence of “free” markets is exclusion. In order to force (or entice) some to pay for something, I have to be able to limit the quantity of an item and access to it. So, for example, if I have a well, and it happens to be the only well in a dry area, I can forced others to pay me for water. But if there is a river nearby, then my well has no value.

Exclusion plays an important role in our lives. For instance, only a few of us can own Rolls Royce’s. The limited quantity and high price excludes most of us. That is as it should be. If we could all have them, they would not have much value.

Exclusion is useful and creates desire for people to be more productive. The principle of “free markets” merely carries exclusion to an extreme. It says that it should apply to all commodities at all times, including even our drinking water. Before Enron went down, it was heavily invested in water supplies.

But here’s the deal: If Enron is in charge of our water, then Enron is going to exclude people from having access. After all, many people in many countries have nothing, and so cannot afford to pay for water. Enron cannot give things away, and so ropes off the water supply where it controls it, and people suffer accordingly.

The alternative to exclusion is inclusion. This idea, when carried to an extreme, has been called “communism.” The very idea that we should all have equal access to all commodities is an anathema to any thinking person.

The ideal society moderates between exclusion and inclusion, holding out most things for private ownership based on ability to pay. But some things, like water, basic foodstuffs, health care and modest housing and pensions, should not be subject to exclusion.

We call this ideal society “socialist,” but the free marketers have done a pretty good job of poisoning that well, saying that socialism and communism are evil stepsisters, or at least that the former inevitably leads to the latter.

It doesn’t, of course. Canada, Western and Northern Europe, Japan, and now China, are finding the precepts of socialism lead to an orderly society and a generally happy population. There are rich people aplenty in all of these lands, but wealth is spread more evenly and and more people enjoy better lives than the American system offers.

The latest battle ground is called “net neutrality.” As with water, our latter-day Enrons want to cordon off the internet so they can charge more for access for some, and exclude others. The rest of us, left in the middle, will have a mediocre product.

That’s how the free market works. It’s surprisingly Orwellian, as the least amount of freedom comes from the greatest exposure to “free” markets.

How I spent the last hour

To: Denver Post, Open Forum
From: moi

Please consider printing the following letter:

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is widely thought of as a “conservative”, but is nothing of the kind. Conservatives are humble people who know that we cannot fully comprehend the workings of complex social structures. So they are cautious. Change is important but should be gradual and carefully monitored to avoid doing more harm than good. Conservatives respect the people and wisdom of the past. Those who preceded us were not fools, even though we don’t always understand why they did what they did.

Frequently spins in grave
There aren’t many conservatives around. Governor Walker is a wild man who might harm hundreds of thousands of people for decades to come. Yet he’s absolutely certain that he is right and so does not listen to or negotiate with people who hold different views.

The modern right wing was born in the turmoil of the fifties and sixties. Far from offering any wisdom, they are mere reactionaries. The fervor, the recklessness, the absence of a thoughtful grounding philosophy – all of this makes them dangerous.

We are allowed only two parties here in the land of the free. One is comprised of radical reactionaries. The other most often shows no grit, no fight.

What a country.

Will NPR go down? Will it be missed?

Tom and Ray Magliozzi
I can see our living room TV out of my office here, and have it on to keep up on the Japan tragedy. It’s an ad fest – I switch between CNN and MSNBC, and odds are that I find advertising on both. This is news American style. Advertising is not only pervasive, but also a major filter for broadcasting and news. Has Time Magazine yet reported of the link between lung cancer and cigarettes? It’s absurd that at one time two major weapons manufacturers reported to us on our wars and the propaganda campaigns leading up to them. But this is America – we are so used to absurdity that we take it for granted.

There is no courage in American news reporting, so I have mixed emotions on the funding cutoff for NPR. Having spent a good part of my life in Billings and Bozeman, Montana, NPR was to me hours and hours of classical music, occasional news, Click and Crack and Warren Olney. But they would leave regular programming to cover major events free of advertising, including congressional hearings and floods. Their “here’s what you should think about this” commentary was kept to a minimum.

Now that government funding will be cut off for NPR, I wonder what will happen to all that band width. NPR will still exist, for sure. It took on corporate overlords years ago, so its news has not been any different than the commercial outlets for decades. But they did provide high quality programming in the non-news areas, including Fresh Air, Car Talk and Wait Wait.*** But hell, I can easily live without all of those. Perhaps the government funding was so small that it won’t be much affected – I do remember NPR getting a $200 million grant from the Estate of Joan Kroc. I even thought at the time that the money might give them some independence.

But to those who say “Why should I have to pay for news outlets that I don’t watch and blah blah blah, all I can say is “F*** your wars that I’m paying for, and my kids and grandkids.

NPR came about in the wake of the sixties, a deliberate attempt to tighten the reins on private radio outlets that had been unpatriotic during that time. Community broadcasting was an important outlet for information and education. It also undermined the propaganda system. Even so, by its very nature, not constrained by advertising in those early years, NPR did some very good work. This is attested to by the fact that the right wing went into hissy fits now and then, and programming was condemned on the floor of the senate and house.

It’s long since gone over the hill to the other side. The wine snob Ron Schiller, who was taken down by the video hit man last week, is all too typical of the limousine liberal fare of that network.

By the way, have you ever noticed that the pay channels often broadcast subversive programs, like Bill Maher’s Real Time? Bryan Gumbel and Real Sports is highly critical of the NFL. Such disrespect is not allowed on regular channels. Oliver Stone is going to run a series called The Secret History of America on Showtime, unless billionaire Haim Saban forces the network to shut him down. Because subscribers pay for those channels, some of the filtering is removed, and some honest and controversial programming slips in. * **

So what happens now? I suppose that NPR chugs along, more subject to corporate financing even than before, and eventually becomes just another crappy radio outlet. Perhaps some of the affiliates will have to go local for programming, and community radio will reappear. That would be a good thing.

But in the end, my only real thought about the loss of NPR is this: Are Tommy and Ray real mechanics, or is that just their radio persona?
___________________
*Sixty Minutes was drooling all over itself after the 1999 movie The Insider came out. It dealt with some explosive inside information about how the tobacco company Brown and Williams knew how deadly their product was and spiked cigarettes with chemicals to make them even more addictive. Several attempts were made to stop the broadcast, but it was aired anyway. That’s what the movie is was about – the 60 minute heroes. Here’s what they forgot to say: Brown and Williams was not allowed to do TV advertising for tobacco products, and had no other divisions besides tobacco, and so had no financial leverage over CBS. That’s why the report even got through in the first place. B&W had to resort to an old-fashioned lawsuit to stop the broadcast, which they eventually lost.

**I believe that it was HBO that showed the movie “Waco: Rules of Engagement“, a documentary about that event that would never make its way to regular TV, as it accused the government of mass murder.

*** When I got satellite radio, I learned about Bob Edwards, Diane Rehm, Brian Lehrer, Talk of the Nation … yawn. Rehm is especially nondescript, but the others place a close second. PRI gives us This American Life with Ira Glass – that is great programming.

Canada has laws about lying, you see

I guess if you get your news from Fox, you’re not going to hear about this, but there is a law in Canada that prohibits a news channel from broadcasting “”….any false or misleading news.” For that reason, Fox news is not shown in Canada. Prime Minister Harper wanted the law repealed so Fox could move into Canada. Regulators up there say no.

How they decide what is false or misleading is not hard. I’ve written in the past couple of weeks about two bright shining lies on Fox, one switching poll results to say that Americans did not support collective bargain rights for Wisconsin public employees, and the other the palm tree incident. The latter is not technically false, but surely misleading.

Subservient chickens

One of Bill Maher’s guests last night on Real Time was Dana Loesch, a Teabagger. She’s quite stupid, which is no surprise, but if you have a chance to watch the broadcast, somewhere deep in, maybe at 35 or 40 minutes, the minimum reserve that she had dissolves. It was like one of those horror movies where some guy is kissing a girl and her skin dissolves and she’s really Satan. Her teeth bared and she said what she really thought about the Wisconsin protesters …

This is who ought to be mad. Taxpayers ought to be mad. And this is the thing that does not make sense about public employee unions, because you have people who are over-promised by slimy, skeezy, scazy politicians who all they care about is getting their votes. So they’re gonna promise them the world, and they under-deliver. Everybody knew that the money was not there, Wisconsin was broke, they still over-promised. They over-promised with taxpayers’ money, they didn’t allow the taxpayers to have a seat at the table …

Man that was ugly. She did not hiss, but venom dripped from the corners of her lips. Her contempt for working people, which is part of the unusual puzzle of our country, was on display. Earlier in the Maher complimented Scott Walker on protecting the besieged billionaires from all of these horrible thousandaires who have so much power.

Loesch is, of course, a commenter on CNN. They have competency testing for teachers, football analysts, but apparently not on news and opinion shows.

I am trying to get above all of this, to understand the makeup up people in general. As the old proverb goes, God must love stupid people, as he made so many of them. Richard Dawkins is kinder, noting that our survival as children requires absolute obedience of and faith in our parents or tribal leaders. In emancipated adults this manifests as faith in authority figures.

So by definition, our survival hinged on our ability to submit to the authority of others.

Dana Loesch is a subservient chicken, if I may borrow that Burger King bird. So too are Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, to name just a few. Their only skill is the ability to shoot off rapid-fire talking points and dominate forums. They never have to sit back, listen, think and respond – they are ongoing monologues occasionally interrupted by commercials. Their thought processes are never analyzed in depth. Maybe they all read an Ann Coulter book or two, if they read at all, but they are reactionaries, and not thinkers. They don’t give us their own opinions – they channel the opinions of others.

I doubt very much that in the 1960’s or 1970’s such low caliber people would be given a national stage. We have degraded to such a degree that our public forums are dominated by maroons. Dana Loesch thinks that Michele Bachmann has presidential timbre.

Aye, what a country!

Why we should hammer the rich with taxes …

The post below regarding democratic governance in an oligarchy offers some insight, maybe, into the events of the past thirty years (and especially the past nine). We’ve been headed down the path of tyranny … Guantanamo, torture, surveillance and wiretaps, loss of civil liberties and freedom of movement. I’ve been spurred on by curiosity, of course, but that curiosity is coupled with anticipation that a trap is going to be sprung at some point. Chris Hedges commented on the precedent set by Obama when he ordered the murder of an American citizen … “things are relatively quiet now, he said (and I paraphrase), “but that power will be important down the road when there is unrest.”

I say thirty years because the critical act that set all of this in motion was the Reagan tax cuts. The oligarchy is always with us, but high marginal tax rates tend to keep them in a cage. The game “Monopoly” is an amazing source of wisdom from the past because it mimics real life. Wealth is as often accidental as the result of great skill, and more often inherited. In the board game, victory follows shortly after one player attains critical mass – enough wealth to deal severe blows to the other players. Then he knocks them off one by one. If we were to introduce a high marginal tax into the game, rather than just a $75 luxury tax, that boring damned game would go on forever!

That game did not arrive on a flying saucer, by the way. It came form the 1920’s, a time much like now. Here’s Wikipedia on the origins of Monopoly:

Monopoly is a redesign of an earlier game “The Landlord’s Game”, first published by the Quaker and political activist Elizabeth Magie. The purpose of that game was to teach people how monopolies end up bankrupting the many and giving extraordinary wealth to one or few individuals.

The game "Monopoly" was meant to be a teaching tool
We’ve traveled that road now, and we have a few individuals now who have accumulated extraordinary wealth. Michael Moore claimed in Madison that 400 individual owned more wealth than half of all Americans. I haven’t fact-checked that, and find it a little hard to believe. But I do know that the top 1% owns more than the bottom 95%. (That is less dramatic – MM likes to say shocking things because he is a good publicist.)

Suppose, for sake of argument, that we allow that that top 1% “earned” that money in some fashion. Elizabeth Magie would remind us that this is not how it works … but assume it’s true anyway. Do we have the right to tax that money away?

Gated community
Yes! Absolutely we do. But that “right” is like all “rights – we created it out of thin air. Only force (or as Black Flag would say, “violence”), keeps that “right” in place. There’s no justice or morality behind it. It’s like war itself – the rich are mere collateral damage. We don’t mean to hurt them, but we must. Perhaps Spock put it best: “The needs of the many, outweighs the needs of the few.” (That phrase is so poorly worded and comma-spliced because Spock was gasping for breath and about to die, OK?)

The mere accumulation of vast wealth in the hands of a few, as we have allowed to happen since 1980, explains much of what we see around us today. Such extremes foster resentment in the lower classes, and there is always the possibility of an uprising. That threat creates the need for surveillance, gated communities, loss of habeas corpus, torture, Guantanamo and indefinite detention, airport screening and long lists of people who are not allowed to fly, draconian drug laws and a massive prison complex.

I’m slow to learn, but have suffered from cognitive dissonance all these years.

Gated community
I knew there was no real threat posed by Muslims or “terrorists,” and yet our leadership was behaving as if these threats were real. I assumed that the only reason was to keep us in a state of fear to spur us into supporting their wars.

That is indeed part of it. But there’s another part, one even more sinister. There is fear of uprising. The laws we passed, the rights we took away, the prisons we built are all there to keep the rabble in line. Extremes of wealth bring this about – without a draconian state to protect them, wealthy people fear an uprising.

So, as it turns out, the oligarchy is not anti-government after all! They only want a government that works for them. It was never about Muslims or “terrorists.” It was about us.

(By the way, I’m a privileged white guy, middle class and all of that. I’m not threatened by all of this. It’s not about me. It’s about those who have lost their jobs, their health care, pensions, homes, and who will lose their unemployment benefits, Social Security and Medicare. If they manage to organize, we will have violence.)

Well, punks, are we ready for a fight?

“

All the ancient and the modern authorities knew that a large middle class is essential. Extremes of wealth in the hands of a few can threaten democratic process, and extremes of poverty remove people from the normal polity and can threaten order.” (Bernard Crick, 1929 – 2008)

We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both. (Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1856 -1941)

That’s all right. These things gotta happen every five years or so, ten years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten years since the last one. (Peter Clemenza, The Godfather Part I)

Note that the two of the three men above lived through the Great Depression and the New Deal. The whole situation in Wisconsin (along with many other places) is troubling, but as Clemenza reminds us, it’s gotta happen. Just substitute every thirty years for ten.

This stuff needs to come to the surface. We need to have this fight. It’s been simmering underneath for years. Governor Walker and the radicals who took the reins in so many places in 2010 need to be exposed. They are mere useful idiots for the oligarchy, those wealthy people who hate working people and democratic governance in general.

This is easily seen: This fight started in 1980 with wealthy people setting in motion the reduction of their taxes via Reagan. Extrapolate from there: If they don’t believe that we have a right to tax them, it only follows that we don’t have rights to restrain them in other ways as well, as with unions in general, regulations on campaign spending, use of taxes to help people in any form. Since voting can take away what they regard as sacred privilege, it only follows that democratic rule is their enemy.

The key event in the 1980 movement was 9/11, which released the beast of fascism from his cage. After that day, right wingers of the ugliest nature slowly rose to power. Couple that with the retreat of the Democrats, who were never much good anyway. Radicals and revolutionaries, formerly known as Birchers, Klansmen, militiamen and Randians, have come to power. With Citizens United in place, they are going for broke. Walker is a radical, but is also a puppet on a string held by oligarchs. He’s a true believer, and a fool.

These wild men are always in the wings. We seem to have to deal with them in thirty-year increments. That’s about the time it takes for a generation to pass. Reagan came to power in 1980 due to former Democrats who left the party to vote for him. These are the “Reagan Democrats.” Left behind were the “New Deal Democrats,” the people who had already learned the lessons we are about to learn again. They slowly died off, and we are left now with no wisdom from the past save that preserved in the 5% minority called the “progressives”, or Naderites, as I prefer.

Governor Walker will be voted out, maybe even recalled, as will his fellow travelers. The question is whether the courts will stand to help us, or whether they too are politicized. Certainly if all of this conflict makes its way to the Roberts Court, unions will go down in flames nationally.

Then the battle starts all over again.

I don’t like to speak in terms of violence, but it is going to be violent, one way or the other. Walker now has it in his power to unilaterally take people off Medicaid, and so innocent people will die as a result due to lack of health care. That is violence. His use of unchecked power to spring the great surprise on Wisconsin is a form of overbearing coercion. Each of these moves will engender reaction.

The game is afoot. It’s time again to fight. Do we have it in us? Do we, punks?