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| Small-town poverty in Washington state c. 1971; one of a series of pictures I made for the Whatcom County Housing Coalition and showcased as a portfolio piece. The associated negative was among the few semi-preserved in files dug out of the ashes six months after the 1983 fire; the white spots visible throughout the image are emulsion damage due to heat and water. Tri-X at 800; Nikon F w/28mm f/2.8 Nikkor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to view it full size.) |
*****
THIS WEEK'S ESSAY will be relatively brief, and not because of a lack of material.
No sooner was I recovering from the early, nasty-surprise influenza that struck me down last week than it was time for the physically painful ordeal of cleaning this apartment from top to bottom in preparation for its quarterly inspection. The pain – the fact it hurts terribly to bend over and the corollary fact I will be effectively bedridden for two or three days after preparing for the inspection – is the result of the steadily deteriorating back injuries inflicted on me by one of Washington state's notoriously coddled alcoholics, a habitual offender who, when he rammed his car into mine in 1978, had at least 19 arrests for drunken driving – every one dismissed.
Meanwhile the inspections are themselves noteworthy. They are among the insultingly intrusive measures by which occupants of lower-income senior housing are repeatedly reminded how we are viewed by the Ruling Class: as failures (else we would not be low income enough to qualify for such facilities), and as hopelessly irresponsible (hence not only the mandatory inspections but – for example – an unwritten but nevertheless total ban on gas cooking in all such accommodations locally).
The latter has forced me into constant combat with the culinary atrocities characteristic of an electric range – decades of seasoning irreparably burned off my three cherished antique cast-iron frying pans, the pans themselves damn near useless as a result, and everything now prepared in them charred on the outside and raw in the middle. Though I never considered myself a gourmet cook, making meals on the gas stoves of my former life was a pleasant and sometimes genuinely rewarding adventure, but now – thanks to capitalism's relentless hostility toward old people as expressed by restriction to electric burners – it's a chore hardly less repugnant than cleaning a refrigerator of contents reduced to reeking compost by long abandonment. My nutritional intake no doubt suffers gravely as a result, though I try to compensate by dosing myself with vitamin supplements.
But enough kvetching. At least I still have a roof over my head...a commodity that under capitalism becomes ever more in doubt.
*****
Coup Fears and Computers: Life in a 21st Century Banana Republic
Originally I planned to lead with a story e-mailed me by my sister Elizabeth Bliss, to whom many thanks for a credible report the capitalist Ruling Class is developing a supercomputer that can reliably predict the intensity of socioeconomic oppression likely to trigger insurrection.
Presumably the new computer will give enough advance warning of impending rebellion, the capitalist aristocracy can either neutralize our rage with pseudo-humanitarian reforms or mobilize the soldiers and police to complete our enslavement.
But that wonderfully heartening news, for which see below, was shoved out of the top spot by an exposé from the Justice Integrity Project via Reader Supported News implying Obama Administration policies are influenced by terror of a corporatist and/or military coup.
“President-Elect Obama's advisors feared in 2008 that authorities would revolt and that Republicans would block his policy agenda if he prosecuted Bush-era war crimes, according to a law school dean who served as one of Obama's top transition advisers,” said the Integrity Project report.
The dean, Christopher Edley Jr. of the University of California (Berkeley) Law School, was “the sixth highest-ranking member of the 2008 post-election transition team preparing Obama's administration,” the report said.
Voiced at a public forum earlier this month, the dean's disclosure “implies that Obama and his team fear the military/national security forces (the president) is supposed be commanding,” the document concluded. “It suggests also that Republicans have intimidated him right from the start of his presidency even though voters in 2008 rejected Republicans by the largest combined presidential-congressional mandate in recent U.S. history.”
If the account is true – and though it is in dire need of a competent editor, its turgid prose seems thoroughly credible – it adds yet another dimension to our understanding of how “change we can believe in” became the biggest Big Lie in U.S. political history and how the candidate of “hope” became Barack the Betrayer.
A real paranoid would thus presume the emergence of a new rationale for President Obama's treachery might be exactly the sort of temporary remedy suggested by the archons of Nurd who operate the supercomputers – such as the Nautilus at the University of Tennessee’s Center for Data Analysis and Visualization – that track and quantify our responses to oppression.
*****
Obama Jobs Speech: Many Promises, Few Rational Hopes of Fulfillment
The big story last week was of course Obama's jobs speech, but buried beneath all the Ruling Class Media boosterism was the fact the nation's two most relevant public intellectuals gave it mixed reviews at best.
Economist Paul Krugman called it “bolder and better than I expected,” but added “it isn't likely to become law, thanks to GOP opposition. Nor is anything else likely to happen that will do much to help the 14 million Americans out of work.”
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich meanwhile asked the sort of questions real journalists would have asked were they anything but stenographers for the Ruling Class and propagandists for capitalism:
“Why did the President include so many tax cuts, and why didn't he make his proposal sufficiently large to make a real impact on jobs and growth?” Mr. Reich then answered his own inquiry: “Because (Obama) crafted it in order to appeal to Republicans. To get it enacted, he needs their votes.”
The third significant commentary on the jobs speech came from AFL/CIO President Richard L. Trumka, whom MSNBC reported was in the audience as a guest of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Trumka was optimistic but skeptical. “The plan announced by President Obama to create jobs is only the opening bid in a national conversation we’ve needed to have for a long time,” he said via an e-mail to the nation's AFL/CIO union members.
Then – no doubt to quell rank-and-file fears he had somehow been co-opted by Ms. Clinton's invitation – he quickly added a warning: “some politicians claim cuts to our social safety net, deregulation and lower taxes for the rich will fix our problems. But they’re flat wrong. If we continue down this road, it only will destroy more jobs and send us into a vicious downward spiral.”
The e-mail linked to a petition, Tell Congress: Working families will judge our elected leaders by whether they act with integrity and energy to create good jobs now.
While none of these three men are (yet) willing to concede that capitalism is evil incarnate – infinite greed as maximum virtue (and thus the implicit overthrow of every code of ethics or morality humanity ever uttered) – each is nevertheless a voice in the proverbial wilderness, a bold rebel who dares shout (some) truth in defiance of power.
*****
And Beyond the Small Momentary Optimism, a New Prognosis of Doom
Alexander Cockburn has long been one of my favorite columnists, and here with his customary lucidity he reads the omens in the jobs speech:
“You can find America's future in blueprints minted in business-funded think tanks 30 to 40 years ago at the dawn of the neo-liberal age: destruction of organized labor, attrition of the social safety net, erosion of government regulation and a war on the poor that will be fought without mercy at every level.”
“Texas, near the bottom in so many social indicators, is the model: Rick Perry is its latest salesman. But whoever the Republican presidential candidate may be, they face in Obama an opponent who agrees with at least half of what they say. In 40 years, I've not seen a gloomier political landscape.”
LB/10 September 2011
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