Occupy Los Angeles

It's a little past one in the morning, I'm tired, and I'm getting ready to go to bed. I've been up watching the news coverage of the LAPD removing the occupy Los Angeles protesters from city hall, and so far, all is peaceful. I don't know what I expected, but I' am pleased that both sides have remained non violent. Unlike Oakland and to a lesser extent New York City, the police in Los Angeles have used a minimalist approach to things. Move a few feet, ask people to leave, and when arrests have been made, it's been done gently. Far better than the reclaiming territory emphasis of other cities.
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While I support the occupy movement, I've also become concerned that the protesters have become addicted to the political theater of the actual occupations. In the long run, it's only through political action, and in the United States that means registering to vote and elections, that real progress can be made in turning back the tide of right wing success. And that is an illustration of the strength of the right wing in America.
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Conservatives didn't just arrive, and over night, replace the age of Roosevelt with the age of Ronald Reagan. They made incremental progress, year after year, moving the center further and further to the right fringes of politics. Those of us on the left came out, voted and elected Barack Obama, an early step in reclaiming the country from the clutches of the Allen Greenspans of the world. And when a liberal House of Representatives sent progressive legislation to the Senate, it died there. President Obama negotiated, made deals and saved a lot, but no where near enough, of that legislation. Our reaction to that should have been to elect even more liberals to congress and move the center back to where it was during the Great Society days of the Johnson administration. But instead, too many of us stayed away from the polls. I don't know whether that was the reaction of spoiled children, crying that we didn't get our way, right now, or whether we were just too preoccupied with other things to care. In any case, we gave congress to the Tea Party, and set the liberal movement back a few years. The Occupy Movement is a beginning. I just hope it doesn't become a dead end.

Home and Revolution

Are political revolutions accompanied by social revolutions?
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All of the political commentary seems to posit that sooner or latter the American people will, once again, have confidence, and will start to spend money. The left/right split seems to be whether that confidence will return from the economic top, or from the middle class and bottom.
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I ride my bikes all over southern California, and as I move from one block to another, I'm reminded of what pre-Reagan America was like. I'm old enough to remember when people bought houses as homes, and not as investments. I'll roll by block after block of what, 30 years ago, were considered large family homes. And then, sometimes in a new development, or a newer house sited among homes from the fifties, sixties or seventies, a McMansion; a house two or three times larger than it's neighbors. Families didn't get bigger. The lust for square footage did.
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The political revolution of the Reagan era was accompanied by a social revolution that was fascinated by ostentatious wealth. Bigger, for the sake of bigger, more for the sake of more. But what if the social revolution of the Obama era is a rejection of excess? We've built an economy that survives through mass consumption. What if the American people now want smaller, more manageable homes? Smaller, more fuel efficient cars? What if the idea of a big screen TV in every room of the house begins to seem silly? If our economy needs excessive consumption to right itself, we might be in big trouble.

Ronald Reagan is Killing Your Children!

I'm in my fifties. I was born and raised in a coal mining town in western Pennsylvania. I went to school in one of the poorer districts in the state. When I was a child we had eight periods of instruction a day. We got new, revised school books every two years. We had a full program of arts and music education. We had technical education, things like auto shop, carpentry, agriculture, business courses, and cooking. We had full sports programs, and three hours of gym a week. We also had a school lunch program that included either meat, chicken or fish, fresh vegetables, salad, and a pint of milk every day of the week. We also had a full time health nurse, who monitored the weights, diet, and general health of each student.
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Ronald Reagan rose to power as the leader of the anti-tax movement. Yes, he had a broad political agenda, but it was opposition to taxes that made him, first, governor of California, and then President of the United States. With the erosion of our tax base under Reagan, one of the things that was defunded was public education. Long gone, in most states, are arts and music programs, new text books, full sports programs, classes that aren't part of core curricula, healthy school lunch programs, and public health nurses. Today's school lunch programs are now governed by the need to provide food as cheaply as possible. I can attest from my personal experience, (I only work part time and have shifted my own diet from quality, fresh foods to starch and fat heavy cheaper foods.) that cheap food is bad food. Too, school districts, desperate to make up lost funding, have turned to soda/junk food, vending machine deals that put extra dollars in school budgets, and high fructose corn syrup in the stomachs of their students.
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Sure, I'll admit it; video gaming, MacDonald's and television haven't helped. But remember, next time you see an obese twelve year old with diabetes, hyper tension and heart disease walk down the street, it was the tax rebellion, and Ronald Reagan that helped put him on the path to early death.

To The Streets

Well, it seems like old times, turning on the television and seeing student protests. This time it's not war or civil rights that motivates American college students, but ever increasing tuition costs as well as a shrinking curricula.
I've written about this in the past, and finally there seems to be a willingness on the part of students to begin the fight.
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We can not have a modern economy without a well educated work force, nor can we have any real class mobility with an undereducated population. It's about time that somebody realizes this and is willing to put up the good fight to provide free higher education for all. As of right now, the protests are just about keeping tuition prices at a reasonable level and stopping the loss of classes, but in the long run the real struggle has to be open access, and free higher education. And that includes graduate schools.
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Again, this goes back to the short sighted stupidity of Ronald Reagan and the tax rebellion. Always ready with a quick quip, when Reagan was asked why he wanted to get rid of free college education in California, he made a joke about not wanting to pay for the education of students who were going to protest his policies. As fun as Ronnie could be, what it got down to was that low taxes and nonexistent government are the goals of the modern conservative movement. What's that old line about fools knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing?
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This is an idea right of the top of my head and it might not be workable. After all, I ran out of money and dropped out of college, so I'm not educated enough to do the math. A national Internet sales tax, including song downloads. Steve Jobs should be able to figure out the best way to collect it. Then, minus administration costs, redistribute those taxes to the states, based on population, on the condition that all college and grad school tuition be eliminated. Hey Steve, a well educated work force makes more money, so they'll buy more stuff on line. In the long run, those profits are going to go up, up, and up, in return for a little sacrifice (in effort) now.

Jackal States

There they were. Roaming the streets of downtown Los Angeles, dressed as Cupids and handing out greetings from the state of Colorado. "Colorado Loves California." Another state trying to make us feel better during our on going budget crisis? Hardly, it was Colorado trying to lure businesses away from California and to Colorado.
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Is this what its' come down to, one state acting like a jackal, trying to enrich itself by driving another into a permanent economic crisis? Sure looks that way. Welcome to the new America. We're not trying to grow native economies anymore. In a country that has endured thirty years of Reaganomics, the only way to survive is to screw the other guy as quickly as possible, because if you don't, he'll do it to you. The social/economic Darwinism envisioned by Ronald Reagan and his cartel conservative supporters has reached it's nadir. There's nothing left but to pick over the rotting corpse of Reagan's America.

Ronald Reagan's Ongoing Attack on America!

There can be no other explanation! Ronald Reagan must have been an international secret agent bent on the destruction of the United States. The recent 32% tuition increase for California's UC system is the latest woeful example of Reagan's, evil, legacy.
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There isn't a reputable economist on the planet who will say that it's possible to have a modern economy without a well educated work force. There was a time when we, in the United States, understood that obvious fact. But then, along came Ronnie and his cohort, Howard Jarvis, who cared more about taxes than the long term viability of the American economy.
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It's hard to believe, but there was a time, not that long ago, when America had one of the finest public education systems in the world. Yes, it's true. Countries like Japan, actually sent educators to the United States to find out how we managed to provide a first class education for the majority of American children! What was our secret? It was very simple, actually. We were willing to pay for it! Ronnie, why did you destroy our future? Why did you insist that low taxes were more important than educating America's youth? Why oh why did we listen to your stupid ideas?
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At a time when it's more important than ever to provide college education for every student capable of doing the work, we've made a college education prohibitively expensive. In less than 50 years, we've gone from having free higher education in California to a college system that is so expensive that only the elite can afford it. That's Ronnie's legacy. He even ran for governor on a platform of ending free college tuition! Ronald Reagan, the worst disaster to befall the United states since the civil war!

American Cassandra

In my last post, I wrote that Ronald Reagan was the worst disaster to befall the United States since the civil war. I just found out that today is the thirtieth anniversary of Jimmy Carter's speech on the OPEC oil embargo caused energy crisis of the late seventies, a perfect opportunity to give another reason for my low opinion of Ronald Reagan, one of America's worst presidents.

I've always thought of Jimmy Carter as the American Cassandra. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of the king of Troy. The gods gave her the gift of prophecy, but also cursed her. She could see the future, but no one would ever believe her. Looking back, Carter was right on so many things, but he lacked the political skill to convince the American electorate of the need to change the way we lived, for the long term good of the country.

Thirty years ago today, President Jimmy Carter gave a speech on an energy crisis, caused by the OPEC oil embargo. In it, he noted that the United States was so dependent on foreign oil, that we had lost our foreign policy independence. He laid out an ambitious, Manhattan Project type plan to make us energy independent. While he could have limited his remarks to freeing ourselves from OPEC oil, through conservation, higher efficiency standards for cars, and alternative fuel production, he also talked about the need to move from a carbon based energy system to clean, renewable sources. Thirty years ago today, Jimmy Carter was laying out a plan to increase solar, wind, and geothermal energy production. If only we had listened.

And then Ronald Reagan became president, with his hostility to government and his belief that markets solve all problems. Well, markets don't solve all problems, markets make money, and if money can be made by making things worse for the majority of Americans, so be it. If we had followed through on the Carter, energy initiatives, today, we'd probably be the world's largest producer of solar energy, as well as the world's leading manufacturer of solar generating equipment. Ditto for wind. We'd probably be driving around in a mixed automobile fleet, powered by oil, natural gas, electricity, hybrid technology, and very likely the first generation of hydrogen cars. And as a bonus, we'd probably be living in a much cleaner environment, and a world far less threatened by global warming.

But, of course, we didn't. In the end, OPEC folded when it became evident that Carter was willing to push energy independence, no matter what the oil producing countries did. Ronald Reagan hailed it as the market solving problems, when in fact it was government's willingness to use direct action to remake the world into a more energy diverse world, that weakened OPEC. Reagan, as only a doctrinaire conservative could, misidentified the problem, and, in the long run, made us more dependent on foreign energy sources, while doing, very likely, irreversible damage to our environment.

So thank you Ronald Reagan. Thank you for a world where we fight wars for oil. Thank you for global warming. Thank you for permanent drought, rising sea levels, and dependence on oil companies, foreign and domestic. You really did screw the American pooch.

Killing Reagan

No, I'm not dealing in hyperbole. I really do think that Ronald Reagan was the worst disaster to befall the United States since the Civil War. Too, if it were possible to quantify, I'm sure that Howard Jarvis would go down in history as having killed far more Americans than Osama bin Ladin.

It isn't just the insane tax cuts, and weakening of the central government that Ronny has to answer for; the big sin of Ronald Reagan is also his greatest success; the successful campaign to rebrand government as stupid, incompetent, and evil.

Before Ronny came along, most Americans looked to government to solve problems. No, the citizenry didn't have blind faith, and we were quick to criticize when things went wrong, but by and large, there was an expectation that government was an important part of our lives, and it existed to deal with problems, and strike a balance between competing interests in our society. The dark cloud of Reaganism changed all that. What was the quote? "Government is the problem, not the solution." We still live in Reagan's America; people still believe that government can do nothing right; that it's better for business to regulate itself, because government will only screw it up. No matter that government was very successful in preventing an economic boom/bust cycle for over fifty years, from the age of Roosevelt to Ford. (And even the economic problems of the Carter administration can be viewed as a temporary hiccup caused by the bills coming due from the Vietnam war.)

For Obama to be a successful president, he will have to reestablish faith in the American government. My guess is that if Obama went to congress, right now, and asked for funds to create jobs in the quickest and most effective manner, something along the lines of the WPA or CCC, he would be attacked, mercilessly, as a big government liberal, and even a Democratic congress would deny him. Too, he has to convince the American people that enforcing anti-trust law and breaking up some of our "too big to fail" business and banking institutions is a good thing. Let's hope he starts with Goldman Sachs. (See my post, Obama's History Lesson, published 6/19/09 for more on this subject.)

The Big Cult

Perhaps it's my age, but I'm not all that bothered by the death of Michael Jackson. Sure, it's sad that he died at 50, a fairly young age, but then again most of the population of the planet is going to die prematurely. For me to mourn the death of a stranger, I would have had to be touched by that person's life in some way, and Jackson's music wasn't really to my taste.

I've always felt that political revolutions are usually accompanied by cultural revolutions, and the rise of Ronald Reagan was most definitely a political revolution. The accompanying cultural revolution ushered in a respect for great wealth, and a willingness to accept any sort of strange behavior from the famous. In short, a good, old fashioned era of personality cults.

I'm sure the Christianists, and moral crusaders will be shocked at my writing this, but no one, other than Reagan himself, embodied the whole personality cult era more than Michael Jackson. The man had an undeniable talent for manufacturing a certain type of facile entertainment, but the real fascination that people had with him was about his bizarre life style. From the endless plastic surgeries, the perpetual child like behavior, and the charges of pedophilia, Jackson's life, not his music was the driving force of our obsession with his every move. I always thought it was like looking at a freeway accident. We all knew it wasn't a good thing for us to be interested in a man who wanted to recreate himself as a asexual, aracial, perpetual child, but we were anyway. I'm not glad he's dead, but I do hope he's forgotten soon.